Psychical research

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PSYCHICAL
RESEARCH

BY

W. F. BARRETT, F.R.S.

PROFESSOR OF EXPERIMENTAL PHYSICS IN THE

ROYAL COLLEGE OF SCIENCE FOR

IRELAND, 1873—1910

NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

LONDON
WILLIAMS AND NORGATE

PREFACE

To compress into a small volume such as
the present an outline of psychical research
has proved a more formidable task than I
anticipated when the Editors asked me to
undertake this work. The problems are so
new and entangled and the results so startling
that it is very difficult to present them in a
brief yet readable and convincing form. A
superficial sketch of the subject might have
been given, but that seemed hardly worthy
of the aim which the Editors have in view.
I have therefore endeavoured to give a brief
survey in separate chapters of the principal
lines of work and of the results so far achieved
by the Society for Psychical Research. One of
the most difficult tasks was to compress into
a chapter or two an intelligible view of the
laborious work of the Society during recent
years in the investigation of automatic
writing and the evidence this may afford for
survival of bodily death: a critical inquiry
that extends over several bulky volumes of the
Society's Proceedings. Happily my friend,
Miss Jane Barlow, D.Litt., who has made a
careful study of this subject and is one of
v

vi PREFACE

the Committee of Reference and Publication
of the S.P.R., generously came to my aid.
Her literary skill is seen in the two last
chapters,wherein she has helped me to outline
the salient features of this evidence and the
general conclusions to which we have been
led. I have also to thank Miss Barlow for
much other kind assistance in the preparation
of this volume. Mrs. H. Sidgwick, D.Litt.,
Hon. Secretary and a former President of the
S.P.R., has also very kindly read the proof
sheets and made some valuable suggestions
which I have adopted. It must, however,
be understood that neither Mrs. Sidgwick nor
the Council of the Society for Psychical Re-
search are in any way responsible for the
conclusions stated and the opinions expressed
in the following pages.

W. F. BARRETT.

Kingstown, Co. Dublin,
August 1911

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGB

PREFACE V

I SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION ... 9

II UNCONSCIOUS MUSCULAR ACTION. THE

PENDULE EXPLORATEUR AUTOSCOPES . 20

III THE SOCIETY FOR PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

HUMAN PERSONALITY 32

THOUGHT-READING . . . .44

V THOUGHT-TRANSFERENCE IN THE NORMAL

STATE OF THE PERCIPIENT . . 52

VI THOUGHT-TRANSFERENCE IN THE HYP-
NOTIC STATE 70

VII MESMERISM HYPNOTISM SUGGESTION . 82

VIII EXPERIMENTAL AND SPONTANEOUS TELE-
PATHY OVER LONG DISTANCES . . 96

IX VISUAL HALLUCINATIONS I PHANTASMS OF

THE LIVING AND DEAD . . .111

vii

viii CONTENTS

CHAP.

X DREAMS AND CRYSTAL- VISIONS . .133

XI SUPERNORMAL PERCEPTION I SEEING WITH-
OUT EYES 151

XII THE SO-CALLED DIVINING- OR DOWSING-
ROD 167

XIII HAUNTINGS AND POLTERGEISTS . .187

XIV THE PHYSICAL PHENOMENA OP SPIRIT-

UALISM 211

XV AUTOMATIC WRITING CROSS-CORRESPON-

DENCE 219

XVI AUTOMATIC WRITING (CONTINUED) SUR-
VIVAL AFTER DEATH . . .236

BIBLIOGRAPHY 249

INDEX 253

PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

CHAPTER I

SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION

THE phenomena we are about to discuss
in the present volume are characterized by
many sceptics as a " recrudescence of super-
stition " (see Nature, vol. 51, p. 122), and on
the other hand by many believers as " evidence
of the supernatural." The average busy man,
who has no time for critical inquiry, probably
thinks that there is a good deal of truth in
both these statements, and therefore prefers
to give the whole subject a wide berth. But
the scornful disdain of the savant and the
credulous belief of the ignorant are now giving
way to a more rational attitude of mind. A
widespread desire exists to know something
about that debatable borderland between
the territory already conquered by science
and the dark realms of ignorance and super-
stition; and to learn what trustworthy
evidence exists on behalf of a large class of
obscure psychical phenomena, the importance
of which it is impossible to exaggerate if the

9

10 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

alleged facts be incontestably established.
To satisfy that desire, in some slight and
imperfect way, is the object of this little book.

The subjects to be considered cover a wide
range, from unconscious muscular action to
the mysterious operation of our subconscious
self; from telepathy to apparitions at the
moment of death; from hypnotism and the
therapeutic effects of suggestion to crystal-
gazing and the emergence of hidden human
faculties; from clairvoyance, or the alleged
perception of objects without the use of the
ordinary channels of sense, to dowsing, or the
finding of underground water and metallic
lodes with the so-called divining rod; from
the reputed hauntings of certain places to the
mischievous pranks of poltergeists (or boisterous!
but harmless ghosts whose asserted freaks may
have given rise both to fetishism and fairies) ;
from the inexplicable sounds and movement
of objects without assignable cause to the
thaumaturgy of the spiritualistic stance;
from the scribbling of planchette and automatic
writing generally to the alleged operation
of unseen and intelligent agents and the
possibility of experimental evidence of human
survival after death.

These phenomena, even if only a fraction of
what is asserted by credible witnesses be true,
open a new and vastly important chapter in
the book of human knowledge. If established,
they reveal a wide and wonderful extension
of human faculty, and give us a glimpse of
the abysses of human personality, of depths

SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 11

that transcend time and sense and outward
things, teaching us that " nature is not a
soulless interaction of atoms, nor life a paltry
misery closed in the grave."

But here we are met, on the one side, with
the objection of many religious people, that
these phenomena belong to the region of the
supernatural, and therefore their investigation
is a hopeless, if it be not an impious, quest;
and on the other side with the complacent
contempt of the superior person, who dismisses
the whole matter with a shrug as pure super-
stition. Therefore, before discussing the evi-
dence on behalf of these obscure phenomena,
let us ask if there be any valid reason for
describing them as either supernatural or
superstitious.

In the childhood of the race every rare or
inexplicable event, whether in the heavens or
on the earth, was regarded as supernatural.
Eclipses, comets, meteorites, and other unusual
meteorological phenomena, were a super-
natural portent or the direct interposition
of the Deity. But the progress of knowledge
has shown that these and all other phenomena
— however mysterious and at present in-
explicable they may be — are part of the order
of nature, are natural and not supernatural.
Even a couple of centuries ago, many of the
marvels of modern scientific discovery would
have been classed as supernatural. To know
what was happening less than an hour ago
at the Antipodes, or to listen to the voice of,
and interchange conversation with, friends in

12 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

different countries — the commonplace of the
telegraph and telephone to-day — not to
mention the transmission of wireless messages
across the Atlantic and the instantaneous
photographic record and reproduction of
rapidly moving objects, all these would have
been thought impossible or miraculous.

The religious mind is ever apt to forget what
Bishop Butler pointed out in the first chapter
of his Analogy, that our notion of what is
natural grows with our greater knowledge,
so that to beings of more extensive knowledge
than ourselves " the whole Christian dispen-
sation may to them appear natural, as natural
as the visible known course of things appears
to us." Miracles, as most theologians, from
St. Augustine onwards, have said, do not
happen in contradiction to nature, they are not
supernatural events, but only transcend what
is at present known to us of nature. We
cannot pretend to determine the boundary
between the natural and the supernatural
until the whole of nature is open to our
knowledge. If at any point scientific investi-
gation finds a limit, what is beyond is only
a part of nature yet unknown. So that,
however marvellous and inexplicable certain
phenomena may be, we feel assured that sooner
or later they will receive their explanation,
and be embraced within some part of the wide
domain of science.

Nor can we restrict these considerations to
the visible universe. The vast procession of
phenomena that constitute the order of nature

SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 13

do not come to an abrupt conclusion when they
can no longer be apprehended by our present
organs of sense. Science already takes cogniz-
ance of the imperceptible, imponderable, and
infinitely rare luminiferous ether, an unseen
form of matter wholly different from anything
known to our senses, the very existence of
which indeed is only known inferentially.
As an eminent scientific writer has said :
" In earlier times the suggestion of such a
medium would probably have been looked
upon as strong evidence of insanity." The
law of continuity leads us to believe that
whatever unknown and perplexing phenomena
may confront us, in the seen or in the unseen
universe, in this world or in any other, we
shall never reach the limit of the natural, and
never be put to intellectual confusion by the
discovery of a chaos instead of a cosmos. At
the centre and throughout every part of this
ever expanding and limitless sphere of nature,
there remains — enshrouded from the gaze of
science — the Ineffable and Supreme Thought
which alone can be termed Supernatural.
For the very term phenomenon, which is only
the Greek word for appearance, means some-
thing brought within the cognizance of the
senses and of the reason, thereby it ceases to
be supernatural and becomes another aspect
of the creative thought of God. Hence the
supernatural can never be a matter of observa-
tion or scientific inquiry; the Divine Being
alone can transcend His handiwork.
To talk, therefore, of apparitions and

14 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

spiritualistic phenomena, etc., as supernatural
is obviously incorrect. Even if established,
they would not lie beyond nor outside nature,
but merely beyond our ordinary normal exper-
ience. They are, in fine, supernormal pheno-
mena, and that word, first suggested by Mr.
F. W. H. Myers, will be used throughout this
book to denote the objects of psychical
research.

Then arises the question, is it worth while
to spend time on subjects which the scientific
world has until lately regarded as relics of
superstition, and which are still so regarded
by many ? It is true that there is now a
growing and marked change of opinion in
this respect among many of the foremost men
of science in every civilized country. But
official science as a body still looks askance at
psychical research and speaks of its adherents
as more or less credulous and superstitious.
What is meant by superstition ? Etymologic-
ally it means the standing over an occur-
rence, in amazement or awe ; shutting out the
light of inquiry and reason. Where this light
enters a mystery is no longer enshrouded by
helplessly standing over it, but we begin to
understand it. Superstition is, therefore, the
antithesis of understanding, and of that faith
in the intelligibility of nature which forms the
foundation of science and the hope of all
intellectual progress.

In a lecture on Science and Superstition
which the writer heard the Rev. Charles
Kingsley deliver at the Royal Institution in

SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 15

London in 1866, and which was published in
Fraser's Magazine for June and July, 1866,
superstition was defined as " fear of the
unknown." This is the frequent accompani-
ment of superstition, but the ancient Greek,
" who believed that every tree or stream or
glen had its nymph, whose kindly office men
might secure by paying them certain honours,"
was a superstitious man, though he did not in
this case exhibit fear of the unknown. Super-
stition may be more accurately defined as a
belief not in accordance with facts, where no
connection exists between the cause ascribed
and the effect imagined, and issues in supersti-
tious practices when such a belief is regarded as
affording help or injury. Some trivial occur-
rence may once have been followed by disaster,
and forthwith it becomes an omen ! Thus a
chance coincidence is to the superstitious a
law of nature. Not only amid the culture of
ancient Greece and Rome, but right down the
ages to the present time, we find this irrational
habit of mind. Nor is it confined to the
credulous and the ignorant. Voltaire went
home out of humour when he heard a raven
croak on his left. Many gallant officers and
clever women dread to sit down thirteen to
dinner, just as the peasant dreads to hear the
screech owl. Omens and portents are still
as rife throughout India as in ancient Rome.
Superstition is the arrest of reason and inquiry,
an ignoble and groundless belief. But in
every case where science comes in at the door
superstition flies out of the window. And so

16 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

to-day if we wish to rid ourselves of the many
silly and mischievous superstitions which
abound in our midst, we must bring to bear
upon them the " dry and clear light " of
science.

How, then, can the scientific investigation
of psychical phenomena be regarded as super-
stitious folly ? Difference of opinion may
exist as to the interpretation of the phenomena
or as to the weight of evidence required to
establish a definite conclusion. But no one
disputes the need of inquiry, nor that numerous
painstaking and competent investigators have
been convinced of the genuineness of many of
the phenomena we shall describe and the vast
importance of the issues they foreshadow.
This being so, the charge of superstition rests
upon those whose scornful and irrational
habit of mind leads them to a belief not in
accordance with facts, and to a practice of
rejecting the weightiest evidence and accepting
the flimsiest — just as it suits their preconceived
notions of the possible and the impossible.
These are the superstitious.

There remains a more common form of
disbelief in psychical phenomena, based upon
the fact that they have not been witnessed by
the objector and cannot be reproduced at will
to convince him. Neither have many of us
witnessed the fall of meteoric stones to the
earth, yet we believe in their existence in
spite of the impossibility of their reproduction
at our pleasure. The reason why we believe is,
of course, the testimony of many trustworthy

SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 17

witnesses to whom we have given attention.
In fact there are some phenomena in physical
science which are as rare, elusive and inexplic-
able as those in psychical research. That
strange phenomenon, to which the name of
fire-ball or globe lightning has been given, is
an example. "As we have hitherto been
unable to reproduce a fire-ball by our most
powerful electrical machines, some philoso-
phers have denied that any such thing can
exist ! But as Arago says : ' Where should
we be if we set ourselves to deny everything
we do not know how to explain ? ' The
amount of trustworthy and independent
evidence which we possess as to the occurrence
of this phenomenon is such as must convince
every reasonable man who chooses to pay due
attention to the subject. No doubt there is a
great deal of exaggeration, as well as much
imperfect and erroneous observation, in
almost all these records. But the existence
of the main feature (the fire-ball) seems to be
proved beyond all doubt." These are the
words of that eminent and genuine scientific
man, the late Professor Tait, and the words I
have italicized are equally true of the principal
phenomena of psychical research. There has
been, no doubt, much " exaggeration and
erroneous observation " in connection with
this subject, but this can also be said of the
early stages of other new and striking additions
to our knowledge.

The fact is, our reason leads us to be
instinctively hostile to the reception of any

18 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

evidence which cannot be readily fitted into
the structure of existing knowledge. We are
all apt to overlook the difference between
evidence which involves only a wide extension
of our knowledge and evidence which involves
a flat contradiction of well-established laws,
such as the law of the conservation of energy.
If telepathy, clairvoyance or even the existence
of discarnate personalities be experimentally
established, a vast extension, but surely no
contradiction, of our present knowledge would
be involved. Moreover, an entirely new dis-
covery, such, for example, as the properties of
radium, could never be accepted if, adopting
Hume's argument against miracles, we refused
to credit it on account of our previous ex-
perience having been uniformly opposed
to it.

Perhaps, however, the chief obstacle to the
general recognition of psychical phenomena
is to be found in our disinclination to accept
in this region, the experience and testimony
of other observers, however eminent and
competent they may be. The splendid and
startling discoveries made by Sir W. Crookes
in physical science were universally received
with respect and belief, but his equally careful
investigation of psychical phenomena were
dismissed by most scientific men as unworthy
of serious attention. It is true the former
were more, and the latter less, accessible to
experimental verification ; but one would have
thought that at least suspense of judgment,
awaiting confirmatory evidence, and not

SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION 19

scornful contempt, would have been a truer
scientific attitude.

Certainly the treatment of hypnotism and
of its courageous pioneers by the medical
profession, down to a comparatively recent
period, is a warning of the grotesque follies
into which science may fall when it rests
its opposition to any new departure not
upon evidence, but upon prejudice and
negation. Unfortunately, science has been
too often the friend of systematic negation.
Facts, as the late Professor W. James has
remarked, " are denied until a welcome
interpretation is offered, then they are ad-
mitted readily enough." No one is omnisci-
ent, and of late we have had to accept so
many things once deemed impossible that we
ought by this time to have learnt the axiom
of that distinguished philosopher, Sir John
Herschel, who tells us " the natural philoso-
pher should believe all things not improbable,
hope all things not impossible."

CHAPTER II

UNCONSCIOUS MUSCULAR ACTION
THE PENDULE EXPLORATEUR — AUTOSCOPES

FROM time to time there comes into vogue,
not only in England, but in widely distant
countries, an amusing but mysterious game
known as the " magic pendulum," or in France
as the pendule explorateur. It consists of a
finger ring or little ball suspended from a
thread which is held between the fingers.
It is held as steadily as possible, nevertheless
the ring soon begins to oscillate, swinging to
and fro like a pendulum, in spite of the effort
of the holder to control it. If the holder clasps
with his free hand a person sitting by his side,
the direction of the oscillation may change
towards that person. Or, when requested
so to do, it may set up a rotatory motion,
either in the direction of, or opposed to, the
hands of a watch, according as the holder is
touched by a lady or a gentleman. If the
ring be suspended within a tumbler it will
usually strike the hour of the day when so re-
quested. If the letters of the alphabet widely
spaced be arranged in a circle and the ring
suspended over the centre, it will frequently

20

UNCONSCIOUS MUSCULAR ACTION 21

spell out answers to questions addressed to
it by oscillating towards successive letters.
The holder of the ring, in order to keep his
hand steady, may rest his elbow on the table,
passing the thread from which the ring is
suspended over the ball of his thumb; a
pendulum about nine inches long is thus
formed and not the least motion of the holder's
hand is discernible. It will be found that
with certain people of either sex the motions
of the pendulum are vigorous and respond to
any question, but with other persons the
pendulum is sluggish or inert. No apparent
reason can be assigned for this difference, for
sensitives are often found among the most
sceptical.

What is the explanation of this mysterious
pendulum ? Simply this, the person who
holds the suspended ring is unintentionally
and unconsciously the source of its motion.
Through the imperceptible and uncontrollable
tremors of his hand or arm the ring or ball
begins to vibrate, and the mode of the vibra-
tion will correspond to his intention. The
curious thing, however, is that the sensitive
cannot, by any intentional voluntary act,
make the ring carry out his wishes, except in
the clumsiest manner and with obvious move-
ments of his hand or arm. But he is able to
do involuntarily and unconsciously what he
cannot perform voluntarily. That his own
muscles are really responsible for the mysteri-
ous motions of the pendule, is seen by suspend-
ing the thread and ring from a rigid support,

22 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

such as a gas bracket. However strongly the
company may now will the ring to move,
it will remain absolutely motionless, except
for currents of air, which may be prevented
by letting the ring depend inside a glass.

In fact, we have in this present-day pastime
a convincing illustration of what has been
termed "motor-automatism," that is to say,
muscular actions performed without the con-
currence of conscious thought and will. We
all know that our life depends on the auto-
matic action of the heart, lungs and digestive
system, which go on involuntarily and uncon-
sciously. In the oscillation of the pendule we
have the automatic actions of muscles, usually
under the control of our conscious thought
and will, unexpectedly responding to the
unconscious, or barely conscious, wish of the
holder of the thread. An interesting illustra-
tion of this was recently given by Professor
Hyslop in America, who used a sort of plumb-
bob suspended by a chain. Holding the
latter between his finger and thumb and
resting his wrist on a fixed support, he found
the ball promptly oscillated, or rotated in
any direction, when he mentally wished it to
do so, even when he closed his eyes. Yet he
tells us he was absolutely unconscious of giving
any motion whatever to the ball and could not
detect the least muscular movement of his
hand. Even coherent messages may be spelt
out by the pendulum without the intention
and to the great amazement of the sensitive
whom we may now call the Automatist. How

UNCONSCIOUS MUSCULAR ACTION 23

these involuntary and intelligent muscular
tremors come about we can only surmise. A
theory which accords with these and other
mysterious automatic phenomena is that
our conscious self has a subconscious or
subliminal self associated with it, a sleeping
partner as it were, that only speaks through
these automatic actions.

With that sleeping partner in our personality
we are not concerned at present, but only
with the mode in which it reveals itself. The
pendule explorateur is not the only way, but
it is perhaps the oldest way of doing this of
which we have any historical record. For
it goes back to the augurs of ancient Rome,
who sometimes used a sort of magnified
pendule. The augur stood in the centre of
a circle, round which were arranged the letters
of the alphabet, and holding in his hand a
string from which an iron ring depended, he
asked the gods for an answer to the question
addressed him. Whereupon the ring began
to oscillate first to one letter and then to
another and the message was spelt out. It
is said that one of the later Roman emperors
thus obtained from the augurs the name of
his probable successor, who was thereupon
promptly put to death.

Coming down through the Middle Ages to
the present time we find an amusing periodic
revival of the magic pendulum. Each period
believes it to be a wonderful novelty, just
discovered, and that its motions are due to an
occult force of surpassing interest and mystery.

24 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

The British Museum has a rich collection of
continental and English books, going back
some centuries, devoted to the investigation
and wonders of the pendule explorateur.
Italian, German, French and English writers,
many of them of considerable learning, tell
us of its mysterious movements and its
scientific value. Even in the Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society of London
for 1736, a paper was published on the remark-
able orbital motions of a little ball suspended
by a thread held in the hand. Mr. Grey,
who made these experiments, was a famous
man, a pioneer in electrical investigation
and a Fellow of the Royal Society. He
fully believed that from these experiments
would arise a new theory to account for
the planetary motions ; for he found that the
little suspended ball always moved in the
same direction as the planets moved round
the, sun. He acknowledged, however, that
" he had not found the experiment succeed
if the thread was supported by anything but
a human hand." Dr. Mortimer, the then
Secretary of the Royal Society, repeated
Grey's experiments with success and hoped
much from them, but Priestley tells us in his
Electricity (published in 1775, p. 60) that a
contemporary savant, Mr. Wheeler, after long-
continued trials came to the conclusion that
the unconscious desire to produce the motion
from west to east was the true explanation,
though he was not sensible of giving any
motion to his hand.

UNCONSCIOUS MUSCULAR ACTION 25

At the beginning of the nineteenth century
the German philosopher, Ritter, thought he had
discovered a new force — Siderism, he called it.
This, however, turned out to be only uncon-
scious muscular tremors given to a suspended
ball or other object lightly held. Some years
later Mrs. De Morgan in her Reminiscences
(p. 216) describes how interested Lady
Byron and other notable people were in the
wonderful gyrations of the little pendulum,
believing it to be " the birth of a new science."
Even within the last year an able journalist
tells the public of a " new invention " whereby
the sex of eggs can be discovered by the mode
of oscillation of the magic pendulum ! Nor
is the widespread illusion of the wonderful
gifts of the oscillatory ring confined to the
civilized world, as among the Karens a ring
suspended by a thread over a metal basin is
used to indicate the one dearest to some
deceased person.

In some parts of France and America a
watch, or a ball, depending from a chain or
fine wire, is carried about by certain persons
who profess to locate underground ores or
springs by its oscillation. The usual method,
however, employed by the " diviner " to
discover underground ore or water, is by means
of a forked twig, the two ends of the fork being
grasped one in each hand. Here we have
another means of indicating slight involuntary
muscular movement, for the twig is held in
neutral or sometimes unstable equilibrium,
and a very slight muscular tremor will cause

26 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

its sudden gyration. Sometimes it will
move either upwards or downwards as the
holder approaches or recedes from the object
of his quest.

In the South of France during the seven-
teenth century the "forked rod " was employed
for an endless variety of purposes. A learned
Jesuit, Father le Brun (Histoire critique des
pratiques super stitieuses, Paris, 1702), tells
us it was used to track criminals and the
fathers of foundlings, to find lost treasure and
lost boundaries, and it was generally appealed
to instead of courts of justice ; in fact, its use
became such a scandal that Cardinal Camus
invoked the authority of the Inquisition, and
early in the eighteenth century its use in the
moral world was rightly prohibited. I will
return to the history and discuss the value of
the so-called divining- or dowsing-rod in the
chapter devoted to this subject. The only
point that interests us now is the sudden and
mysterious motion of the rod, or the baguette as
it is called in France. We owe the first clear
demonstration of the true cause of its motion
to a well-known French scientist, M. Chevreul,
who in 1854 published a work entitled La
Baguette Divinatoire, in which he shows how
closely related are the movements of the
baguette to those of the pendule explorateur9
and that both were due to unconscious
muscular action (see also a letter from
Chevreul in the Revue des deux Mondes in
1833).

Chevreul, however, was not the first to dis-

UNCONSCIOUS MUSCULAR ACTION 27

cover the fact that in some unconscious way
the holder of the forked twig really moved it.
Two centuries earlier a learned Jesuit, Father
A. Kircher, one of the founders of experi-
mental science, proved that the " divining-
rod " was inert if balanced on a fixed support
and moved only when held by a living person
(see Kircher 's folio Magnes sive de Arte
Magnetica^ 1640, p. 724, and his later work,
Mundus Subterraneus, vol. ii., p. 200). More-
over, Chevreul, though he cleared away the
follies that had clustered round the pendule,
was himself mistaken in thinking the holder
of the thread pendulum or the baguette con-
sciously intended it to move in a certain way.
This is not the case. As Professor Pierre
Janet points out, these automatic actions take
place independently of any conscious volition
on the part of the operator ("Sans le vouloir
et sans le savoir," L'Automatisme Psycholo-
gique, by P. Janet, Paris, 1889, p. 373 et seq. See
also Professor C. Richet's Des Mouvements
inconscientes, Paris, 1886).

A study of these unconscious movements
has recently been made by several experi-
mental psychologists in France, Germany
and America. The conclusion was reached
that if the attention can be given elsewhere,
it is possible to cultivate in many persons
automatic movements often of great vigour
and complexity, which respond to slight
unconsciously-received suggestions. Further-
more, as Professor P. Janet says, in certain
cases more knowledge is exhibited in these

28 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

automatic manifestations than is possessed
by our conscious personality, and the study
of the source of this knowledge forms a large
part of psychical research.

We may summarize what we have said as
follows. Our conscious self always speaks
through various voluntary muscular move-
ments, ideas chiefly expressing themselves
in articulate language. Behind the conscious
self lies the large unperceived background
of our personality, which reveals itself through
involuntary muscular actions to which ordin-
arily we give no heed. Either they are internal
and concerned with the movements and
physiological processes of the organs of the
body, or they are external and, generally
speaking, too small to be perceptible.

Some instrumental means, as we have seen,
is therefore necessary to render visible these
minute unconscious external automatic
actions. It is desirable to give a generic
name to this class of "instrument, and I have
suggested the term Autoscope or " self-viewer."
Two autoscopes we have found in (1) the
little portable pendulum and (2) in the
forked twig, but there are others. (3) A
pencil, lightly and passively held so that it
can write freely on paper, forms an excellent
autoscope with some persons, and (4) a little
heart-shaped wooden table mounted with
three legs, two furnished with small rollers
and the third with a pencil, is a common form
of autoscope and goes by the name of plan-
chette. The sitters place their fingers lightly

UNCONSCIOUS MUSCULAR ACTION 29

on planchette, and presently it begins to scrawl
out letters and sometimes long coherent mes-
sages, or answers questions. (5) The so-called
" ouija board" is another autoscope; here
the letters of the alphabet are pointed out by
a little travelling board on which the sitters'
hands are placed. (6) A small table, round
which a few persons can sit with their fingers
resting lightly around the tip of the table,
is a common form of autoscope. The table
begins to turn and often to tilt and rap out
messages according to a prearranged code.
Faraday, with that quick insight and wonder-
ful experimental skill he possessed, long ago
showed that the unconscious muscular action
of the sitters — when their fingers ever so lightly
touched the table — was sufficient to account
for its motion. But here, as elsewhere, the
muscular hypothesis fails when the table
moves without any one touching it, as we
shall see is sometimes the case. In the middle
of the last century in Guadaloupe, a chair
formed a similar autoscope and went by the
name of Juanita ; prose and poetry were spelt
out by the chair, much to the astonishment
of those touching it. (7) A simple and effici-
ent autoscope could easily be made out of a
poised index or lever, the longer end pointing
to the letters of the alphabet and the shorter
end having a cross-piece attached to be
touched by the sitters. (8) Passive living
persons can also act as autoscopes when
they are lightly touched by another person.
This, as shown in a succeeding chapter, is the

30 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

explanation of the " willing game " and of the
success of professional " thought-readers "
like Bishop and Cumberland a generation
ago. There are also other autoscopes which
give rise to sensory hallucinations, such as
the visions seen by gazing at a translucent
object like a ball of glass.

Now as language, which need not be speech
but any form of expression, is necessary for
our conscious thought and reason, so auto-
scopes furnish a means whereby the hidden
part of our personality, the dumb partner of
our life, can outwardly express itself; a means
whereby an intelligence not under our con-
scious control can reveal itself by some physical
or sensory manifestation.

It is just because these manifestations appear
to be so novel and detached from ourselves
that they are apt to be so misleading to some
and so mischievous to others. Interpreted
on the one hand as the play of a wonderful
occult force, science has refused to have
anything to do with phenomena which seem
to obey no physical laws, but are capricious
and self-determined. Interpreted on the
other, truly enough, as the exhibition of a free
and intelligent agent, some infernal or dis-
carnate spirit has been fixed upon as the
cause, and a fictitious authority is often given
to their indications.

Whether these intelligent automatic move-
ments and hallucinations exhibit information
outside the memory, either active or latent,
of the individual who uses the autoscope;

UNCONSCIOUS MUSCULAR ACTION 31

or a knowledge beyond that which may have
been unconsciously derived from the known
environment, animate and inanimate, — is a
problem which can only be solved so as to
gain general acceptance by long and patient
inquiry. Of this the investigations already
published in the Proceedings of the Society for
Psychical Research are an earnest. To the
scope and work of that Society we must now
turn.

CHAPTER III

THE SOCIETY FOR PSYCHICAL RESEARCH —
HUMAN PERSONALITY

THERE can be little doubt that the wide-
spread and intelligent interest which in recent
years has been taken in psychical research is
due to the work of the Society founded for its
investigation and to the scholarly presentation
of that work in the two volumes on Human
Personality which we owe to the brilliant
genius and indefatigable labour of the late
Frederic W. H. Myers. It is, moreover, a
noteworthy fact that the essential portion, the
first four lengthy chapters, of Mr. Myers'
magnum opus is now included in the examina-
tion for the Fellowship in Mental and Moral
Philosophy in Trinity College, Dublin, the
highest prize in that famous University.

The whirligig of time has indeed brought
its revenges more quickly than usual, when we
find that a subject which was scorned and
ridiculed by the learned world, when the
Society for Psychical Research was founded
in 1882, has now become an integral part of
advanced psychological study in at least one
great University.

The success which the Society has achieved

32

HUMAN PERSONALITY 33

is in no small measure due to the wise counsel
and constant supervision of the late Pro-
fessor H. Sidgwick. It was singularly fortunate
that from the outset and for several succeeding
years, one so learned, cautious and critical
as Professor Sidgwick was President of the
Society ; a position also held by Mrs. Sidgwick,
who has given, and, as Hon. Secretary in
recent years, continues to give, the benefit of
her wide knowledge and unremitting care to
all the details of its work. To these names
must be added those of the late Edmund
Gurney and Frederic Myers — for many years
Hon. Secretaries of the Society — whose
indefatigable labours and brilliant genius
were devoted to laying the foundations of the
Society, upon which the latter, ere his sudden
death, had begun to build, and we may fain
hope is still aiding to build, an enduring edifice.
Those of us who took part in the foundation
of the Society were convinced that amidst
much illusion and deception there exists an
important body of facts, hitherto unrecognized
by science, which, if incontestably established,
would be of supreme importance and interest.
By applying scientific methods to their in-
vestigation these obscure phenomena are
being gradually rescued from the disorderly
mystery of ignorance : but this is a work not
of one, but of many generations. For this
reason, it was necessary to form a society,
the aim of which should be to bring to bear
on these obscure questions the same spirit
of exact and unimpassioned inquiry which has
B

34 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

enabled science to solve so many problems
once no less obscure nor less hotly debated.

The aversion which so many scientific men
have felt for psychical research arises, perhaps,
from a disregard of the essential difference
between physical and psychical science. The
only gateways of knowledge according to
the former are the familiar organs of sense,
whereas the latter indicates that these gateways
can be occasionally transcended. The main
object of physical science is to measure and
forecast, and from its phenomena life and
free-will must be eliminated. Psychical
phenomena can neither be measured nor
forecast, as in their case the influence of life
and volition can neither be eliminated nor
foreseen.

In fact, the study of human personality and
the extent of human faculty form the main
objects of psychical research. Its investiga-
tions have already thrown much light on these
profound problems. Our Ego is not the simple
thing " admitting of no degrees " and manifest
only in our normal consciousness, which the
older psychologists taught. On the contrary,
the results of psychical research have led many
to accept the view, so ably advocated by
Mr. Myers, that the conscious self, with which
we are familiar in our waking life, is but a
portion of a " more comprehensive conscious-
ness, a profounder faculty, which for the most
part remains potential, so far as regards the
life on earth," but which may be liberated in
full activity by the change we call death.

HUMAN PERSONALITY 35

Others, like Mr. Gerald Balfour, in his
Presidential Address to the S.P.R., suggest a
more complex view of human personality. To
the solution of this profound problem we are
still groping our way, and for the present all
theories must be regarded as merely pro-
visional. As a convenient working hypothesis
I have adopted Mr. Myers' view, but the
reader will please understand that, even in
the absence of qualifying words, this view is
adopted provisionally and not dogmatically.
All, however, will admit the existence of a
subconscious life in addition to the primary
consciousness with which we are familiar.

Just as experimental physics has shown
that each sunbeam embraces a potent invisible
radiation, as well as the visible radiation we
perceive, so experimental psychology affords
evidence that each human personality em-
braces a potent hidden faculty or self, as well as
the familiar conscious self. Mr. Myers, using
the psychological conception of a threshold, or
limen, has termed the former the subliminal
self. This expresses all the mental activities,
thoughts, feelings, etc., which lie beneath the
threshold of consciousness. This threshold
must be regarded not so much as the entrance
to a chamber but rather as the normal margin
of the sea in the boundless ocean of life.
Above this margin or ocean level rise the
separate islands of conscious life, but these
visible portions rest on an invisible and larger
submerged part. Again, far beneath the ocean
surface all the separate islands unite in the

B 2

36 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

vast submerged ocean bed. In like manner,
human personality rears its separate peaks in
our waking conscious life, but its foundations
rest on the hidden subliminal life, and
submerged deeper still lies the Universal
ocean bed, uniting all life with the Fount of life.
Sleep and waking are the tides of life, which
periodically cover and expose the island peaks
of consciousness. Death may be regarded as
a subsidence of the island below the ocean
level ; the withdrawal of human life, from our
present superficial view, which sees but a frag-
ment of the whole sum of human personality.

Now the subliminal self not only contains
the record of unheeded past impressions, a
latent memory, but also has activities and
faculties far transcending the range of our
conscious self. In this it resembles the
invisible radiation of the sun, which is the main
source of all physical and vital energy in this
world. Evidence of these higher subliminal
faculties is not wanting ; we see them sometimes
emerging in hypnotic trance, in works of
genius and inspiration and in the arithmetical
and musical performances of infant prodigies.

As an illustration of subliminal activity,
the following case shows the almost incredible
swiftness and ease with which " calculating
boys " can work out long arithmetical prob-
lems in their head, in far less time than expert
adults require, even using pencil and paper.
Mr. E. Blyth of Edinburgh (Proc. S.P.E., vol.
viii., p. 352) relates this incident of his brother
Benjamin : —

HUMAN PERSONALITY 37

" When almost six years of age, Ben was
walking with his father before breakfast, when
he said — ' Papa, at what hour was I born ? '
He was told 4 a.m., and he then asked, ' What
o'clock is it at present ? ' He was told
7.50 a.m. The child walked on a few hundred
yards, then turned to his father and stated
the number of seconds he had lived. My
father noted down the figures, made the
calculation when he got home, and told Ben
he was 172,800 seconds wrong, to which he got
a ready reply : 6 Oh, papa, you have left out
two days for the leap years — 1820 and 1824,'
which was the case. This latter fact of the
extra day in leap year is not known to many
children of six, and if any one will try to teach
an ordinary child of those years the multi-
plication table up to 12 x 12 he will be better
able to realize how extraordinary was this
calculation for such an infant."

In fact, this arithmetical power was not the
result of the child's education but rather an
innate faculty, or, as Mr. Myers expresses it,
a " subliminal uprush." In such cases, the
possessor of the gift cannot explain how he
attained it, and usually it disappears after
childhood. Thus Professor Safford, when a
child of ten, could correctly work in his head
in one minute a multiplication sum whose
answer consisted of thirty-six figures, but lost
this faculty as he grew up, though in adult life
he needed it most.

The conception of a subliminal self
originated with one of the most eminent

38 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

scientific men of the last generation, Sir John
Herschel, who tells us he was led to believe,
from a curious experience of his own, that
" there was evidence of a thought, an intelli-
gence, working within our own organization,
distinct from that of our own [conscious]
personality." Certainly the everyday pro-
cesses of the development, nutrition and
repair of our body and brain, which go on
automatically and unconsciously within us,
are far beyond the powers of our conscious
personality. All life shares with us this
miraculous automatism : no chemist, with all
his appliances, can turn bread-stuff into brain-
stuff, or hay into milk.

It must be borne in mind that the term
subliminal, as used by Mr. Myers, and now
generally adopted, has a very wide scope.
It includes well recognized vital and mental
phenomena such as : — (1) Those sense impres-
sions which were either unheeded, or too weak
to arouse conscious perception of them when
they occurred, but which float into conscious-
ness during stillness, sleep or hypnotic trance,
when the stronger sense impressions are
removed. In like manner, the faint light
of the stars emerges, with the fading of the
stronger light of day. (2) The living but
unconscious power that controls the physio-
logical and recuperative processes of our own
body and which are profoundly affected by
" suggestion." (3) The higher mental faculties
which emerge in genius, infant prodigies,
hypnotic trance, etc. (4) The disintegration

HUMAN PERSONALITY 39

of personality which is seen in dual conscious-
ness, secondary and even multiplex-selves
displacing the normal self. All these lie
within the scope of orthodox psychology.
The term subliminal is also used to denote
(5) those submerged and higher faculties of
percipience, such as " seeing without eyes,"
which are alleged to exist in some persons,
and also (6) those phenomena which claim an
origin outside the mind of the percipient;
which origin may be sought (a) in the minds
of other living men, as in telepathy, or (b) in —
as some believe — disembodied minds, discar-
nate intelligences, whether human or otherwise.
These latter phenomena (b), if established, I
should prefer to call supraliminal, " above the
threshold " — but this term Mr. Myers has
restricted to, and it is now used to denote, all
that relates to our ordinary waking conscious-
ness; this might have been perhaps more
appropriately called cisliminal — " within the
threshold " of consciousness.

Here and there we find certain individuals,
through whom the subliminal self, as regards
(5) and (6), manifests itself more freely than
through others; these have been termed
" mediums," a word, it is true, that suggests
Browning's Sludge. But, just as scientific
investigation has shown that mesmerists and
dowsers are not all charlatans, so it has shown
that even paid mediums are not always rogues,
though the term " psychic "or " automatist "
would certainly be preferable. The scepti-
cism which ridicules the necessity of a

40 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

" medium " is forgetful of the fact that all
physical phenomena which cannot be directly
perceived by our senses, require the inter-
vention of a physical medium to make them
perceptible.

Thus the invisible radiation of the sun can
only be investigated through some medium
such as a photographic plate, or a delicate
thermoscope, both of which render those
invisible rays perceptible to our vision. In
like manner the subliminal self, as mentioned
in the preceding chapter, requires some agency,
mechanical or sensory — some autoscope —
to render its operation sensible. There is
therefore nothing incomprehensible or un-
scientific in the necessity for an automatist or
medium in those phenomena which transcend
our conscious apprehension.

This extension of human faculty, revealing,
as it does, more profoundly the mysterious
depths of our being, enables us to explain
many phenomena that have been attributed
to discarnate human beings. Does it explain
all the phenomena included in the domain of
psychical research ? I venture to think it
does not, but at present we have to grope our
way and clear the ground for the future
explorer of these unknown regions.

Here let us pause in order to note that
among the many eminent men who have given
their adhesion to the Society for Psychical
Research, we find a former Prime Minister, the
Right Hon. A. J. Balfour, was President of
the Psychical Research Society in 1893, and a

HUMAN PERSONALITY 41

Vice-President from the outset, while another
Prime Minister, Mr. Gladstone, was a member
of the Society and deeply interested in its
work. Nor have the foremost representatives
of British, Continental and American Science
held aloof. That eminent savant. Sir W.
Crookes, O.M., now Foreign Secretary of the
Royal Society of London, has been President
of the S.P.R. — as we shall call it for brevity —
and the President of the Royal Society itself
is, as was his predecessor, a member of the
S.P.R., together with such illustrious scientific
men as Dr. A. R. Wallace, O.M., Sir J. J.
Thomson, Lord Rayleigh, O.M., Sir O. Lodge,
and many others. We may name among
other distinguished Continental adherents of
the S.P.R. its former President, Professor C.
Richet," the distinguished physiologist ; Mme.
Curie, the discoverer of radium; Professors
Bergson, Bernheim, Janet, Ribot and the
late Professor Hertz; and in America the late
Professor W. James, also a former President
of the S.P.R., with Professors E. Pickering
and Bowditch. Among great names in
English literature and art, who were honorary
members of the Society, are to be found Lord
Tennyson, Mr. Ruskin and Mr. G. F. Watts.
The numerical growth and active work of the
S.P.R. is no less remarkable; it now numbers
upwards of 1,200 members and associates, and
has had at various times considerable sums
placed at its disposal, towards an endowment
for research work.

Certainly the first decade of the twentieth

42 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

century will form a memorable epoch in the
history of Psychical Research, were it for
no other reason than that it has seen the
removal of the most eminent investigators
of psychical phenomena. Edmund Gurney
had gone before, and now Henry Sidgwick,
Frederic Myers, Richard Hodgson, William
James, and Frank Podmore — though his
outlook was narrower — have successively
passed away, leaving empty places that can
scarcely be filled and impoverishing us by the
withdrawal of so much wisdom, knowledge
and zeal, though happily bequeathing to us
their fruit in accomplished work of the utmost
value.

But it is not by losses only, or even we may
trust chiefly, that these years will be com-
memorated. They have marked a period of
exceptionally rapid progress along the lines
laid down for the study of the various subjects
comprehended under the term of Psychical
Research; more especially in one of its main
problems. Evidence bearing on the question
of the existence of unseen intelligences, ap-
parently in some cases directing the hand
in automatic writing, has accumulated with
unusual abundance; its increase in quantity
being, moreover, accompanied by an im-
provement in quality, which is a very notable
feature. Now, as on any hypothesis of
survival, such a result is just what we might
expect to follow the passing into another life
of persons deeply interested as well as widely
experienced in the difficult problems that

HUMAN PERSONALITY 43

confront us, the fact that the result has
followed seems in some degree to strengthen
the hypothesis of their continued activity
and co-operation.

The consideration of this evidence must be
postponed to the sequel ; the extent of human
faculty, seen in other phenomena of psychical
research, must first engage our attention;
to this we must now turn.

CHAPTER IV

THE "WILLING GAME" AND SO-CALLED
THOUGHT-READING

SOME years ago a parlour pastime called
the " Willing Game " was a favourite amuse-
ment and gave rise to much public discussion.
Certain persons were very expert at what
appeared to be " thought-reading," a few
became professional performers. The public
were greatly mystified, some considering it
a trick, others that the remarkable success
attained in private circles proved that
trickery was out of the question, and afforded
evidence of genuine " thought-transference."
But the usual method of playing the game
showed that a simpler explanation could be
given. The blindfolded performer, whom we
may call the percipient, had to do something
that had been concealed from him, such as to
find a hidden object, pick out a certain person,
or write a figure on a blackboard, etc. Some
one of the company who knew the secret, and
whom we will call the agent, laid his hands
lightly on the shoulders or forehead of the
percipient, sometimes he grasped the hand of
the latter and placed it on his forehead, and
then thought intently of the thing to be done,
44

SO-CALLED THOUGHT-READING 45

but made no conscious effort of guidance. If
the percipient were a good subject, and allowed
his mind to remain passive, he rarely failed
to accomplish what was desired; nor could
he give the least explanation of how he did
it. Both agent and percipient were equally
astonished, and it is no wonder that those who
took part in the performance at home were
convinced that some kind of mental wireless
telegraphy occurred, independently of the
senses.

Here, for example, are some experiments
made when I was staying with my friend, the
late Mr. Lawson Tait, the famous surgeon,
in the Easter of 1877 : The subject, a medical
man, having left the room and placed himself
beyond eye and ear shot, we agreed that on his
return he should move the fire-screen and double
it back. Recalling the subject, my host, the
surgeon, put his hands round the subject's
waist and silently willed what should be done.
After a few moments of indecision he did
exactly what was mentally wished. Among
other experiments we desired the subject
should turn off the gas tap of one out of several
gas brackets. This was accurately done, no
word being spoken, only the subject was
lightly grasped as before. Here it is difficult
to understand how the " muscular sense "
would lead to the raising of the hands and
correct performance of the wish. Information
can, however, be conveyed through involun-
tary gestures or glances from those who know
what has to be done, if the subject is not

46 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

blindfolded, and blindfolding is often ineffec-
tive, because carelessly done.

Thirty years ago, two professional " thought-
readers," a Mr. Bishop and a Mr. Cumberland,
gained a wide celebrity through their per-
formances in public and before famous
personages. A small committee of eminent
men, among whom were Mr. (afterwards Sir
Francis) Galton, Mr. G. J. Romanes and others,
made some careful tests of Mr. Bishop's
powers. A report of this committee written
by Mr. Romanes was published in the scientific
journal Nature for June 23, 1881. The
following extract from that report is of
interest. The experiments took place in
a large drawing-room, in the house of Professor
Croom Robertson.

" First, Mr. Bishop was taken out of the
room by me (G. J. Romanes) to the hall down-
stairs, where I blindfolded him with a handker-
chief ; and, in order to do so securely, I thrust
pieces of cotton-wool beneath the handkerchief
below the eyes. In all the subsequent ex-
periments Mr. Bishop was blindfolded, and in
the same manner. While I was doing this,
Mr. Alfred Sidgwick was hiding a small object
beneath one of the several rugs in the drawing-
room; it having been previously arranged
that he was to choose any object he liked for
this purpose, and to conceal it in any part of
the drawing-room which his fancy might
select. When he had done this the drawing-
room door was opened and the word ' Ready '
called. I then led Mr. Bishop up-stairs, and

SO-CALLED THOUGHT-READING 47

handed him over to Mr. Sidgwick, who at that
moment was standing in the middle line
between the two drawing-rooms, with his
back to the rug in question, and at a distance
from it of about fifteen feet. Mr. Bishop then
took the left hand of Mr. Sidgwick, placed it
on his (Mr. Bishop's) forehead, and requested
him to think continuously of the place where
the object was concealed. After standing
motionless for about ten seconds Mr. Bishop
suddenly faced round, walked briskly with
Mr. Sidgwick in a direct line to the rug, raised
it, and picked up the object. In doing all
this there was not the slightest hesitation, so
that to all appearance it seemed as if Mr.
Bishop knew as well as Mr. Sidgwick the pre-
cise spot where the ob j ect was lying. ' ' Neither
did it make any difference whether the article
was placed at a high or a low elevation.

Mr. Romanes then describes experiments
in which Mr. Bishop was successful in locating
any small spot thought of on the body of any
member of the committee, or on any table or
chair, etc. In conclusion, it is stated, that
as in all these trials Mr. Bishop was effectually
blindfolded and had no means of direct
information, " his success was unquestionably
very striking."

Nevertheless, that success Mr. Romanes
suggests was due to : " Mr. Bishop interpreting,
whether consciously or unconsciously, the
indications involuntarily and unwittingly sup-
plied to him by the muscles of his subjects."
Failure results when the subject [i.e. the agent]

48 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

" is blindfolded and loses his bearings, or when
the connection between Mr. Bishop and the
subject is not of a rigid nature."

The committee then tested Mr. Bishop to
ascertain if he had an exceptional degree of
tactile sensibility, or power of distinguishing
between small variations of resistance and
pressure. But the result showed this was
not the case, he had in fact rather less tactile
sensibility than some members of the com-
mittee; his success was not therefore due to
this cause, but ascribed " to his having paid
greater attention to the subject " —whatever
that may mean. Nor is the successful per-
former, whoever he may be, always conscious of
being guided by any muscular sense. In fact,
Dr. W. B. Carpenter (the physiologist) in the
following number of Nature relates how he
himself was equally successful in discovering
a particular card that had been chosen, yet
though he watched carefully for any material
guidance, he could not tell how he was led
to make the right selection.

It is certainly a very remarkable thing, as
Mr. Romanes points out, that Mr. Bishop and
other successful " thought-readers " should
unconsciously and almost instantaneously
interpret imperceptible muscular movements
unconsciously made by the agent. Albeit
that the muscular sense is concerned in most
cases is evident from the following experiments
which any one can make, and which, as a
matter of fact, I tried many years ago with
a clever amateur " thought-reader," then a

SO-CALLED THOUGHT-READING 49

young man, now an Irish M.P. and K.C.
Put a piece of cotton-wool between the fingers
of the agent and the shoulder or head of the
percipient, and as a rule no success is obtainable
unless the cotton-wool be pressed so hard that
the compressed wool conveys the variations
of pressure. Ask the quasi thought-reader
to name aloud the figure thought of, or the
place where the object is hidden, and he
cannot do so; in fact, he consciously knows
nothing of what he has to do, but is uncon-
sciously guided, probably by slight differences
in the contact of the agent's hand. Blindfold
the agent and not the percipient, and if the
former loses his bearings, as Mr. Romanes
says, the experiment fails. Let a slack piece
of string connect the agent and percipient and
the experiment fails, though it may succeed
with a wire connection, as this can transmit
variations of tension. The passive percipient
is in fact the autoscope of the agent.

A word or two must be said in conclusion
about the public performance of so-called
" thought -readers." The exhibitions given
by Bishop and by Cumberland some years
ago are, as already explained, interesting
displays of unconscious muscular guidance,
verging, it may be, occasionally into incipient
and genuine thought-transference. Other
public exhibitions, like those of the Zancigs,
cannot be so explained, as the performers
are far apart. Here only two explanations
are possible — telepathy or trickery. Now
the characteristic of all genuine telepathic

50 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

phenomena, as now known, is their elusiveness.
Sometimes, why we do not know, great success
is attainable in telepathic experiments ; at
other times, with the same persons, and under,
apparently, the same conditions, dismal failure
results. Obviously a public performer cannot
depend upon so fitful and uncertain a faculty.
The audience come to see an exhibition and
they must not be disappointed. It is therefore
highly improbable that any regular public
performance of so-called thought-reading
is a genuine exhibition of telepathy. But a
cleverly arranged code of signals has not this
uncertainty, and when the performer and his
subject are proficient in such a code they may
bamboozle the most inquisitive among the
audience. The code may consist in variations
of the question, " Can you see this ? " " Now can
you see ? " " What is this ? " etc., or in various
slight sounds or movements made by the
performer, and so on. One of these public
performers, whose subject was a young girl,
apparently hypnotized, startled the public
some years ago. He gave me a private
exhibition, for which I had secured the help
of a shorthand writer, who was not seen by
the performers. After an interesting display,
an examination of the shorthand notes showed
the existence of some kind of verbal code
though it could not be fully unravelled.

The performance of the Zancigs and of one
or two others is far more remarkable and
puzzling ; whatever method they employ is
not generally known. I had the opportunity

SO-CALLED THOUGHT-READING 51

of testing the Zancigs at a private performance
in Dublin, and they courteously submitted
themselves to a committee of S.P.R. members in
London, giving an exhibition in rooms selected
by the committee. Though I was unable to
be present on that occasion, my place was
better filled by a member of the Council who
is an expert conjurer. The committee arrived
at no conclusion, some of the experiments
looked like genuine telepathy, and possibly
this exists to some extent between the two per-
formers. But the fact that M. Zancig requires
to be the transmitting agent, and the almost
unfailing success of the trials, differentiates
them from the experiments on genuine thought-
transference which will be described in the next
chapter. Moreover, no scientific results of
any value can be expected from those who
are engaged in paid public exhibitions.
Nevertheless, every one gives so much more
credence to what he has seen than to what he
has read, that a critical and scientific friend,
who had scoffed at the evidence for telepathy
laboriously obtained by the S.P.R. , informed
me some time ago that he had been converted
to a belief in its reality. On inquiring how
this came about, he told me he had witnessed
and tested a public performance of thought-
reading, which turned out to be much inferior
to that given by the Zancigs !

CHAPTER V

THOUGHT-TRANSFERENCE IN THE NORMAL
STATE OF THE PERCIPIENT

THOSE who have made numerous experi-
ments with good subjects in the so-called
" willing game " have, as already stated,
found it extremely difficult to account for
some of the successful results by the hypo-
thesis of involuntary muscular guidance — an
hypothesis often stretched to illegitimate
lengths. Thirty years ago, in a communica-
tion published in the scientific journal Nature
for July 7, 1881, I wrote—

" After making the most extravagant allow-
ance for the existence in some persons of a
muscular sense of preternatural acuteness,
there still remained a large residuum of facts
wholly unaccounted for on any received
hypothesis. These facts pointed in the
direction of the existence either of a hitherto
unrecognized sensory organ, or of the direct
action of mind on mind without the inter-
vention of any sense impressions. Such
startling conclusions could not be accepted
without prolonged and severe examination,
and it was in the hope of stimulating inquiry,
among those who had more leisure and fitness
62

THOUGHT-TRANSFERENCE 53

for the pursuit than myself, that led me to
publish a few years ago a brief record of my
experiments, which, however, only brought
derision and denunciation upon me. As no
physiologist came forward to give the subject
the wide and patient inquiry it demanded,
I went on with the investigation, and for five
years have never let an opportunity slip which
would add to the information I possessed.
A letter addressed to the Times, in September
1876, asking for communications from those
who had witnessed good illustrations of the
' willing game,' brought me in a flood of
replies from all parts of England. Each case
that seemed worthy of inquiry was, if possible,
visited and investigated by myself during the
vacation."

One of these cases which seemed quite
inexplicable on any theory of muscle-reading,
and which was personally investigated during
Easter 1881, was that of the children of the
late Rev. A. M. Creery, a respected clergyman
in Buxton. This case is historically of
importance, for it led to the first clear evidence
of thought-transference in the normal state
of the percipient. Stringent precautions were
taken to avoid any information being conveyed
to the subject through the ordinary channels
of sense. For example, one of the percipients,
Maud, then a child of twelve years old, was
taken to an empty adjoining room and both
doors closed. I then wrote down some object
likely to be in the house, which we (the family
together with myself) silently thought of.

54 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

No one was allowed to leave their place or
to speak a word. The percipient had pre-
viously been told to fetch the object as
soon as she " guessed " what it was, and then
return with it to the drawing-room where we
were seated. Quoting again from my commu-
nication to Nature —

" Having fastened the doors I wrote down
the following articles, one by one, with the
results stated — hair-brush, correctly brought;
wine-glass, correctly brought ; orange, correctly
brought; toasting-fork, wrong on the first
attempt, right on the second ; apple, correctly
brought ; knife, correctly brought ; smoothing-
iron, correctly brought; tumbler, correctly
brought; cup, correctly brought; saucer,
failure. Then names of towns were fixed on,
the name to be called out by the child outside
the closed door of the drawing-room, but
guessed when fastened into the adjoining
room. In this way, Liverpool, Stockport,
Lancaster, York, Manchester, Macclesfield
were all correctly given; Leicester was said
to be Chester; Windsor, Birmingham and
Canterbury were failures."

The success obtained in these and other
experiments could not be explained by mere
lucky guesses nor by any involuntary guidance
from those who knew, for there was no contact,
and in some trials (as in the foregoing) the per-
cipient was out of sight and hearing. Under
such circumstances any secret code of signals
between children would have been practically
impossible to carry out; moreover, in several

THOUGHT-TRANSFERENCE 55

successful experiments no one but myself
knew what was to be done.

A new and promising field of scientific
inquiry was thus opened up, and it was
necessary that other investigators should
either verify or disprove the evidence so far
obtained on behalf of a faculty hitherto
unrecognized by science. But such an investi-
gation lay outside the scope of any existing
scientific society ; it therefore seemed essential
to form a new Society to carry on the inquiry
and publish the results obtained. Accord-
ingly,' after consultation with Mr. Myers, Mr.
Romanes and others, a conference was called
by the present writer, at which an account
was given of the evidence so far obtained on
behalf of thought-transference and other
psychical phenomena. This resulted in the
foundation of the Society for Psychical
Research in January 1882, an investigation
of the evidence on behalf of thought-trans-
ference being the first work undertaken by
the Society. The special committee appointed
for this purpose consisted of Mr. F. W. H.
Myers, Mr. E. Gurney and the present writer.

A preliminary account of the results ob-
tained at Buxton with the Misses Creery
was published as a joint article by Gurney,
Myers and myself, in the Nineteenth Century
for June 1882; this therefore marks a not
unimportant date in the history of psychi-
cal research ; the full details of our research
appeared in the first volume of the Proceedings
of the S.P.R. Precautions were of course

56 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

taken to avoid any indication reaching the
percipient through the ordinary channels of
sense. The exceptional nature of the inquiry
made it necessary for the committee to put
on one side any argument based on moral
character and demeanour, therefore they
formed their conclusions only on those experi-
ments where the investigating committee
alone knew the selected word or thing. This
is expressly emphasized and reiterated in their
Reports, and yet disregarded by critics. Even
as regards the committee the same scrupulous
care was taken, sometimes one member and
sometimes another being excluded from the
trials.

Here, for instance, are some experiments,
quoted in the first Report (Proc. S.P.R., vol.
i., p. 22), where I was not present, nor did any
of the family know the object selected, so that
neither I nor they can be accused of being
" in the trick." The experiments were re-
corded by Mr. Myers and copied from the
MS. notes which he made at the time, still
in my possession :—

" The second series of experiments, which
we venture to think are unexceptionable, were
made by Mr. Myers and Mr. Gurney, together
with two ladies who were entire strangers to
the family. None of the family knew what
we had selected, the type of thing [a card or
a number, etc.] only being told to the child
chosen to guess. The experimenters took
every precaution in order that no indication,
however slight, should reach the child. She

THOUGHT-TRANSFERENCE 57

was recalled by one of the experimenters and
stood near the door with downcast eyes. In
this way the following results were obtained.
The thing selected is printed in italics, and the
only words spoken during the experiment are
put in parentheses —

" Experiments made on April 13, 1882 —
[Omitting some successful experiments with
numbers and names, the following were
noted as specially evidential by Gurney and
Myers.]

" Cards to be named. [A full pack was used,
from which one was drawn at random.]

Two of clubs. — Right first time.

Queen of diamonds. — Right first time.

Four of spades. — Failed.

Four of hearts. — Right first time.

King of hearts. — Right first time.

Two of diamonds. — Right first time

Ace of hearts. — Right first time.

Nine of spades. — Right first time.

Five of diamonds. — Four of diamonds (No).

Four of hearts (No). Five of diamonds

(Right).

Two of spades. — Right first time.
Eight of diamonds. — -Ace of diamonds

said ; no second trial given.
Three of hearts. — Right first time.
Five of clubs. — Failed.
Ace of spades. — Failed.

" Special precautions were taken to avoid
errors of experiment . . . and the results show

58 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

that, in the case of cards, out of fourteen succes-
sive trials nine were guessed rightly the first
time, and only three trials can be said to have
been complete failures. On none of these occa-
sions was it even remotely possible for the child
to obtain by any ordinary means a knowledge
of the card selected. Our own facial expres-
sion was the only index open to her ; and even
if we had not purposely looked as neutral as
possible, it is difficult to imagine how we could
have unconsciously carried, say, the two of
diamonds written on our foreheads."

There remains only the hypothesis of a
lucky series of guesses. But the probability
of this can be estimated, and that is the main
reason why cards or some definite series of
numbers were selected. In the case of playing
cards, the odds against guessing any particular
card rightly were of course 51 to 1 ; but when,
as in this case, five cards in succession are
named rightly on the first response, the odds
against this happening by pure chance are
considerably over a million to one. These,
and many other experiments made later on,
were submitted to one of the highest authorities
on the Calculus of Probabilities, Professor
Edgeworth. Only those experiments were
selected in which knowledge of the object
thought of was confined exclusively to the
investigating committee. Altogether under
these conditions there were some 450 trials
with cards and numbers : of these 260 trials
were made with playing cards, the first
response giving on an average one quite

THOUGHT-TRANSFERENCE 59

right in nine times, instead of one in fifty-
two, as would result from pure guesswork.
Similar results were obtained with numbers
of two figures. Mr. Edgeworth, as the result
of his calculations, stated that chance coin-
cidence is certainly ruled out, and " the
recorded observations must have resulted
either from collusion on the part of those
concerned or from thought-transference."

It is necessary to examine this alternative
of collusion a little more closely, as doubt
has been thrown on this wonderful series of
experiments because signalling was discovered
between the children some time afterwards,
when they had practically lost their psychic
gift. But however clever a signaller may be, his
ingenuity only comes into play when he knows
what to signal. In the experiments just
referred to the committee alone knew, and
therefore if collusion occurred, one or other
of the committee must have been partici-
pators. Now the credit of any one witness
is not likely to suffice for the demand here
made upon it, but every additional witness
who, as De Morgan said, "has a fair stock
of credit to draw upon," is an important gain.
Hence, to the great advantage of this investi-
gation, Professor and Mrs. Henry Sidgwick
early in the inquiry went to Buxton and made
a series of experiments, in some of which I
took part, with the result that they were
convinced a prima facie case existed on behalf
of the genuineness of the phenomena; and
later on, more conclusive experiments with

60 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

other subjects, converted them to a belief in
thought-transference.

To the witnesses already named may also
be added, at this early period, the late Professor
Balfour Stewart, F.R.S., who kindly acceded
to my request to make independent trials
with the same percipients. Professor (now
Sir Alfred) Hopkinson, Vice-Chancellor of
the University of Manchester, accompanied
Professor B. Stewart, and though their tests
were fewer and less stringent, they corrobor-
ated the conclusions of the committee.
Furthermore, in 1882 some of the children
came over to my house at Kingstown and
also went to Mr. Myers' house in Cambridge,
and at both places numerous successful
experiments were made under the strictest
conditions. Take, for instance, the experi-
ments at Cambridge in August 1882 (see
Proc. S.P.R., vol. i.), where the percipient,
Miss M. Creery, was placed " outside a closed
and locked door, a yard or two from it, in
charge of one of the committee, who observed
her attentively." Within the room one of
the committee silently drew a card from a
pack and held it in view of the sitters : in
this way out of ten trials two cards were named
rightly on the first answer, besides several
close approximations. On another day Mrs.
Myers and I alone knew the card selected, and
out of eight trials, three were guessed rightly —
one, it is true, on a second attempt. A com-
parative experiment was also made by allow-
ing two of the sisters of the percipient to know

THOUGHT-TRANSFERENCE 61

the card chosen, and the same degree of
success was obtained. The original note-books
of these long and wearisome experiments, only
a portion of which were published, are still in
my possession, and conclusively establish the
fact that collusion except on the part of
one or other of the committee was entirely
out of the question.

But freshness of interest on the part of the
percipient appears essential to success; we
all noted that the best results were obtained
on those days when there was no weariness
or anxiety for success. At the close of the
third Report, the committee state that the
power of the percipients gradually diminished
during the months over which the experiments
extended, so that at the end they failed under
the easiest and most lax conditions, where at
the beginning they succeeded under the most
stringent tests. This gradual decline of
power, they remark, " resembled the disap-
pearance of a transitory pathological condi-
tion, being the very opposite of what might
be expected from a growing proficiency in
code communication." It is therefore less
surprising to find that when the Misses Creery,
anxious to appear successful, were tested
again some time later at Cambridge, it
was discovered that they were using a
code of signals. Here one of the sisters was
allowed to know the thing selected, and she
tried to help her sister to " guess " it by this
improper means.

Whether this had occurred in the earlier

62 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

trials or not, it obviously discredits all experi-
ments where such a thing is at all possible.
Hence the necessity, emphasized in the pre-
ceding pages, of confining our attention in
all cases to, and drawing our conclusions
from, those trials where the investigators
themselves could alone be charged with the
possibility of collusion.

Professor Sidgwick, in a Presidential ad-
dress to the S.P.R., before these later trials
(Proc., vol. ii., p. 154), has given the best
answer to those who would reject the evidence
afforded by the early experiments. He
remarks —

" None of our critics appear to me to
appreciate the kind and degree of evidence
that we have already obtained. They often
imply that the experiments on thought-
transference are such as could be performed
by ' cheating mediums or mesmerists,' by
the simple means of a code of signals, which
the investigating committee cannot find out;
quite ignoring such cases as that given in
Proc. £.P.jR.,Part I., where the cards guessed by
one of the Miss Creerys were unknown to any
one but the four strangers who went to witness
the experiments; and where, therefore, as I
have before said, the investigators must either
have been idiots, or one or other of them in
the trick. Similar remarks may be made
about the experiments reported in the last
Proceedings, where four or five different
persons must either have been guilty of
unveracity or collusion, or of most abnormal

THOUGHT-TRANSFERENCE 63

srtupidity if the phenomena were not
genuine."

It is right to say that, although I differed
from them, Professor Sidgwick, together
with Mr. Myers and Mr. Gurney, subsequently
decided against further publishing any of
these experiments. They no doubt con-
sidered that at such an elementary stage of
the investigation, with as yet so small a
quantity of evidence to lay before so many
hostile critics, it was absolutely necessary to
shun even the appearance of the slightest
contact with detected fraud. Under the
changed conditions of the present day, how-
ever, there is no longer any reason for setting
aside the, as I believe, unimpeachable experi-
ments in the earlier series.

In fact, numerous investigators, both at
home and abroad, have since obtained addi-
tional and irrefragable evidence on behalf of
thought-transference. The first of these
contributions was made in 1883 in a paper
read before the Literary and Philosophical
Society of Liverpool — the authors being Mr.
Malcolm Guthrie and Mr. Birchall, the Hon.
Secretary of that Society. A fuller report of
these and subsequent experiments by the
same investigators was contributed to the
Proceedings of the S.P.R., 1883-85. The
subjects, or percipients, in these experiments
were two young ladies, well known to Mr.
Guthrie, and every care was taken to prevent
any information being conveyed through the
organs of sense. Mr. Gurney and Mr. Myers

64 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

and myself were present at some of the trials,
which were specially interesting as showing
that the mental transfer of tastes and pains
took place in the normal as well as in the
hypnotic state. Thus a collection was made
of some twenty strongly tasting substances;
these were put into small bottles or parcels
and kept out of sight of the subject; every
care was taken to prevent any odour of the
substance reaching the percipient, moreover
no strongly odorous substance was used in
these trials. The percipient being seated
with her back to the agent and blindfolded,
the taster, usually outside the room, then
silently took a small quantity of one of the
substances, put it in his mouth, and returning
placed his hand on the shoulder of the per-
cipient, who called out what she apparently
tasted; no one else was allowed to speak.
Thus the agent having tasted vinegar, the
percipient said she felt " a sharp and nasty
taste." The agent then tasted mustard, and
the percipient at once said, " I now taste
mustard." But this seemed to spoil the next
couple of trials, as the percipient said, " I still
feel the hot taste of mustard." Another
evening, Worcester sauce, bitter aloes, alum,
nutmeg, cloves and cayenne pepper were cor-
rectly named by the percipient. There were,
it is true, several failures, but the successes
were quite beyond pure guesswork, though
more complete protection (which was made
subsequently) against the possibility of the
percipient obtaining indications through the

THOUGHT-TRANSFERENCE 65

sense of smell would have been desirable;
nevertheless alum, bitter aloes and an acid
lozenge, all correctly named, give off no
sensible odour.

This possible objection of odour does not
apply to the transference of pains. Here
Dr. Herdman, F.R.S., the distinguished Pro-
fessor of Natural History in the University
of Liverpool, was present with other investi-
gators, and corroborated the results obtained
in his presence. The percipient, Miss Ralph,
one of the two ladies referred to, was seated
as before, blindfolded with her back to the
investigators, who all agreed noiselessly to
inflict upon themselves some similar trivial
pain. There was no contact with the percipi-
ent. In all twenty trials were made ; in ten of
these the percipient localized the pain with
great precision; in six the localization was
nearly exact, and in four nothing was felt or
the localization was wrong. These experiments
show that in certain subjects in a passive
waking state, a " community of sensation "
occurs between the agent and percipient, such
as was long before observed when the subject
was in the mesmeric trance.

We are also indebted to Mr. Guthrie for a
lengthy and carefully conducted series of
experiments on the mental transference of
colours, rough diagrams of pictures and
imaginary scenes. Sir Oliver Lodge, F.R.S.,
was present at many of these trials. The
drawing or object to be thought of was placed
out of sight of the percipient, whose eyes were

66 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

also bandaged. It would take too long to
give even a summary of these experiments;
one or two may be quoted which were made
in Dr. Herdman's rooms —

Object : a pair of scissors partly open, points
downwards. Percipient says, " It is a pair of
scissors standing up, a little open." Object :
A key. Percipient : " It's bright, it looks like
a key." Told to draw it, the percipient
drew it inverted. Object : Outline drawing of
a little flag. Percipient : " It's a little flag."
Told to draw it, she drew it as it was, upright,
but laterally inverted. The frequent lateral
inversion of objects by other percipients I have
also noticed. A different drawing was next
made, but put aside and purposely the drawing
of the flag again put up. Percipient : " I
still see that flag." Object : An oval locket
hung up. Percipient : 'I see something
gold, something hanging, like a gold locket."
Asked what shape, " It's oval."

An interesting experiment was made with
success to try the effect of two agents looking
at different objects and to note if the percipi-
ent saw the combined result. This experi-
ment, made by Sir O. Lodge, was described
by him in a letter to Nature of June 12, 1884.
This simultaneous effect of two minds on one
percipient is significant, as it affords a proof
of the joint agency, occasionally found to
occur in connection with spontaneous cases
of telepathy that will be considered later.

The transference of colours and scenes was
also more or less successful, and these all

THOUGHT-TRANSFERENCE 67

point to a visual impression made on the
percipient. More striking were the reproduc-
tion of rough drawings, obtained by Mr. Guth-
rie, Mr. Gurney and other experimenters ; these
cannot be reproduced here, and our readers
are referred to the Proceedings of the S.P.R.,
vols. ii. and iii.,or to Mr. Myers' Human Person-
ality, vol. i., where illustrations of the original
drawing and its reproduction by the percipient
are given side by side. To avoid the possi-
bility of muscular guidance, no contact can
ever be allowed between the agent and per-
cipient in such experiments. The drawings
were made for the most part in another room,
and consisted of any simple random figure
that occurred to the investigator, such, for
example, as a tuning-fork, a scroll, dumb-
bells, the outline of a head, a horse, a fish, etc.
The percipient was blindfolded, the drawing
placed on a wooden stand between the agent
and percipient and in silence gazed at by the
former. When the percipient received an
impression, which usually occurred after half-
a-minute to two or three minutes, she was
allowed to remove the bandage and draw
what she had mentally perceived. Her
position rendered it absolutely impossible
for her to obtain a glimpse of the original
drawing, and she was kept under the closest
observation the whole time and complete
silence preserved. Under these stringent
conditions many of the reproductions closely
resembled the original drawing, and by no
possibility could be ascribed to lucky guesses.
c 2

68 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

Summing up the result of the numerous
Liverpool experiments, Mr. Guthrie states
that 437 trials were made with objects, colours,
drawings, numbers, pains, tastes, etc.; of
these 237 were correctly transferred and a
few others partly correct. Entire corrobor-
ation of these results have been obtained
by many other independent and competent
observers, both at home and abroad. Hence
though not yet officially recognized by science,
no doubt of the reality of thought-trans-
ference can be left on the mind of any diligent
and thoughtful student, however critical he
may be. This conviction is greatly strength-
ened by the additional evidence to be found (1)
in experiments during the hypnotic state, to
which we must turn in the next chapter, and
(2) by the transmission of mental impressions
and hallucinations over great distances. It was
the recognition of this latter fact that led Mr.
Myers to suggest the general term Telepathy,
" feeling at a distance," to cover, as he remarks,
" all cases of the communication of impressions
of any kind from one mind to another indepen-
dently of the recognized channels of sense.
Telepathy may thus exist between two men
in the same room as truly as between one
man in England and another in Australia,
or between one still living on earth and another
long since deceased."

The tremendous and far-reaching implica-
tions involved in the fact of telepathy renders
its discovery of the utmost importance to
philosophical and religious thought, as well

THOUGHT-TRANSFERENCE 69

as to psychology. These implications can-
not be discussed here; obviously telepathy
renders a purely materialistic philosophy
untenable, and furnishes the prospect of a
far more perfect interchange of thought than
by the clumsy mechanism of speech. It
affords a rational basis for prayer and inspira-
tion, and gives us a distant glimpse of the
possibility of communion without language
not only between men of various races and
tongues, but between every sentient creature,
which if not attainable here may await us all
in that future state when we shall "know
even as we are known."

CHAPTER VI

THOUGHT-TRANSFERENCE IN THE
HYPNOTIC STATE

THE older mesmerists had noticed sixty
or seventy years ago that there sometimes
occurred a " community of sensation " between
the operator and the entranced subject;
the latter indicating correctly the taste of
various articles such as salt, sugar, cinnamon,
etc., which the operator placed in his own
mouth, unseen by the percipient. A former
distinguished Professor of Physiology, both in
King's College and in the Royal College of
Surgeons, London, Dr. Mayo, F.R.S., whose
enlightened views were far ahead of his
scientific friends, writing in 1850, confirms
this. He tells us —

" The entranced person, who has no feeling
or taste or smell of his own, feels, tastes, and
smells everything that is made to tell on the
sense of the operator. If mustard or sugar
be put in his [the subject's] own mouth he
seems not to know they are there ; if mustard
is placed on the tongue of the operator the
entranced person expresses great disgust and
tries to spit it out. The same with bodily
pain. If you pluck a hair from the operator's
70

THOUGHT-TRANSFERENCE 71

head, the other complains of the pain you have
given him."

These results were confirmed by other
observers both in England and abroad, but,
strangely enough, the significance of these
observations was long overlooked. The atten-
tion of the pioneers in hypnotic investigation
was, in fact, largely confined to the therapeutic
and anaesthetic effect of hypnotism, and to
combating the prejudices and unscrupulous
attacks with which they were assailed in the
medical press of that period.

My own attention was directed to the sub-
ject by witnessing some hypnotic experiments
made by a friend whilst staying at his country
house in Westmeath, about the year 1870.
Fresh from the Royal Institution in London,
conversant with and fully sharing the scep-
ticism of the scientific world of that time, as
to the genuineness of these alleged marvels,
I was interested but unconvinced by the
experiments which I witnessed. It was not
until my host allowed me to repeat the experi-
ments and to choose the subjects myself that
my scepticism gave way. Selecting two or
three of the village children, they were placed
in a quiet room, a scrap of paper was put in
the palms of their hands, and they were told
to gaze at it steadily. One of their number
soon passed into a sleep-waking state, and
became susceptible to any suggestion, however
absurd, which I might make. The others
were dismissed, and the sensitive subject put
into a deeper sleep by a few passes of my hand

72 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

down her face and body. Lifting the eyelid
of the subject and touching the eye with my
finger, no reflex action, or instinctive contrac-
tion, occurred. The eyeball was turned up-
wards and the subject apparently was in
profound slumber. Pricking her hand with a
needle, no sign of feeling was evoked. My
host had a medical induction coil by which
powerful shocks could be administered; the
terminals were placed in the hands and on
the cheeks of the subject, and the current
applied; no notice was taken of shocks
that in the normal state it would have been
impossible to bear with equanimity. When
her name was called loudly by others than
myself no reply was given, but when I whis-
pered her name, however faintly, or even
inaudibly and outside the room, an instant
response was given. Collecting a number of
things from the pantry on to a table near me,
and standing behind the girl, whose eyes I
had securely bandaged, I took up some salt
and put it in my mouth ; instantly she sputtered
and exclaimed, " What for are you putting salt
in my mouth ? " Then I tried sugar ; she said,
4 That's better " ; asked what it was like, she
said, " Sweet." Then mustard, pepper, ginger,
etc., were tried ; each was named, and appar-
ently tasted by the girl when I put them in
my own mouth, but when placed in her
mouth she seemed to disregard them. Put-
ting my hand over a lighted candle and slightly
burning it, the subject, who was still blind-
folded and had her back to me, instantly

THOUGHT-TRANSFERENCE 73

called out her hand was burnt, and showed
evident pain. Nor did it make any differ-
ence when I repeated these experiments in
an adjoining room, nor when every one was
excluded from the room but myself and the
subject.

On another occasion, after hypnotizing the
girl as before, I took a card at random from
a pack in another room, noted what it was,
placed it within a book, and giving the
closed book to the subject asked her if she
could see what was inside. She made no
attempt to open the book, but held it to the
side of her head and said there was something
" with red spots on it." I told her to count
the spots, and she said there were " five."
The card was, in fact, the five of diamonds.
Other cards chosen by me and concealed in a
similar way were, for the most part, correctly
described, though sometimes she failed, saying
the things were dim. One of the most in-
teresting experiments was made when in
answer to my request that she would mentally
visit London and go to Regent Street, she
correctly described the optician's shop of
which I was thinking. As a matter of fact,
I found, upon subsequent inquiry, that the
girl had never gone fifty miles away from her
remote Irish village. Nevertheless, not only
did she correctly describe the position of this
shop, but told me of some large crystals of
Iceland spar (" that made things look double ")
which I knew were in the shop, and that a big
clock hung outside over the entrance, as was

74 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

the case. It was impossible for the subject to
gain any information of these facts through
the ordinary channels of sense, as there was
no conversation about the matter. My friend,
the late Mr. W. E. Wilson, F.R.S., was present
when these experiments were made in his
father's house, and in answer to my request
he subsequently wrote to me confirming them,
saying, " We proved beyond all doubt that the
subject was able to read the thoughts of the
mesmerizer."

The evidence, in fact, appeared so incon-
testable and of such vast importance if estab-
lished, that I ventured to bring these and other
psychical phenomena that had come under
my own observation before the British Associa-
tion in 1876, with a view to the appointment
of experts to investigate and report on the
whole subject, but the idea was scorned at the
time. The following sentence from that paper
of thirty-five years ago may here be quoted—

" In many other ways I convinced myself
that the existence of a distinct idea in my own
mind gave rise to an image of the idea in the
subject's mind; not always a clear image, but
one that could not fail to be recognized as a
more or less distorted reflection of my own
thought. The important point is that every
care was taken to prevent any unconscious
movement of the lips, or otherwise giving any
indication to the subject, although one could
hardly reveal the contents of an optician's shop
by facial indications" (Proc. S.P.R., vol. i.y
p. 243).

THOUGHT-TRANSFERENCE 75

In these early experiments I noticed that
the hypnotized subject responded to thought-
transference even when a considerable distance
and opaque objects intervened. Later on, in
1882, some careful experiments on this point
•were made by me in my own house at Kings-
town, Co. Dublin. Here the subject was a
lad named Fearnley, and the hypnotizer, a
complete stranger to him, was a friend, Mr.
G. A. Smith. On one of two precisely similar
cards I wrote the word " Yes," and on the
other " No." Placing the hypnotized subject
or percipient so that he could not see the cards
I held, a request was made that he would open
his hand if the card " Yes " was shown to the
agent, Mr. Smith, or not open it if " No " was
pointed to. In this way Mr. Smith, who was
not in contact with the percipient, silently
willed in accordance with the card shown to
him. Twenty experiments were made, under
the strictest conditions to avoid any pos-
sibility of information being gained by the
ordinary channels of sense, and only three
failures resulted. Then the subject was re-
quested to answer aloud whether he heard
me or not. When "Yes" was handed to
Mr. Smith he silently willed the subject should
hear, -when "No" that he should not hear.
The object was to reduce the experiment to
the simplest form to try the effect of increasing
distance. In all except the first few experi-
ments, the cards were shuffled by me with
their face downwards, and then the unknown
card handed by me to Mr. Smith, who looked

76 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

at it and willed accordingly. This precaution
was taken to avoid any possible indication
being gained by the percipient from the tone
in which I asked the question. After I had
noted the reply, and not till then, was the
card looked at by me. The percipient re-
mained throughout motionless, with eyes
closed and apparently asleep in an arm-chair
in one corner of my study; it is needless to
repeat that even had he been wide awake he
had no means whatever of seeing which card
was selected by me. Here are the results,
with varying distances between the agent,
Mr. Smith, and the percipient, Fearnley. It
must be borne in mind that not a single word
was spoken, nor any sound made by Mr.
Smith.

" At 3 feet apart, twenty-five trials were suc-
cessively made, and in every case the subject
responded, or did not respond, in exact accord-
ance with the silent will of Mr. Smith, as
directed by the card selected. At 6 feet apart
six similar trials were made without a single
failure. At 12 feet apart six more trials were
made without a single failure. At 17 feet
apart six more trials were made without a
single failure. In this last case Mr. Smith
had to be placed outside the study door, which
was then closed with the exception of a narrow
chink just wide enough to admit of passing a
card in or out, whilst I remained in the study
observing the subject.

"A final experiment was made when Mr.
Smith was taken across the hall and placed in

THOUGHT-TRANSFERENCE 77

the dining-room, at a distance of about 30 feet
from the subject, two doors, both quite closed,
intervening. Under these conditions three
trials were made with success, the ' Yes '
response being, however, very faint and hardly
audible to me when I returned to the study
to ask the usual question after handing the
card to the distant operator. At this point,
the subject fell into a deep sleep and made
no further replies to the questions addressed
to him " (Proc. S.P.R., vol. ii., p. 14).

Subsequently other trials were made under
different conditions with the percipient in
total darkness, with successful results. Alto-
gether about one hundred trials were made,
during which there were only four wrong
answers and one doubtful one, and for these
Mr. Smith blamed himself rather than the
percipient. Pure chance would have given
about one-half right instead of the ninety-five
right actually obtained.

When the subject was awakened he said
he had heard the question each time, but
when he gave no answer he felt unable
to control his muscles so as to frame the
word.

In 1883 Mr. Ed. Gurney made a number
of excellent experiments on the mental trans-
ference of pains, between the hypnotizer,
Mr. Smith, and the subject, in this case a lad
named Wells. I was present at many of
these experiments, and can testify that it was
quite impossible for the subject to have ob-
tained any information through the ordinary

78 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

channels of sense. Wells was blindfolded and
Mr. Smith stood behind his chair. Mr. Gurney,
or one of us, then silently pricked or pinched
Mr. Smith in different parts of his body. The
only words spoken were " Do you feel any-
thing ? " addressed to Wells. Out of twenty-
four experiments made in this way, the exact
spot was correctly indicated by the subject
twenty times. With another subject also in
a light hypnotic trance similar results were
obtained, together with the transference of
tastes. Whenever Mr. Smith was given a
substance to put in his mouth, the subject,
in nearly all cases, correctly indicated the
taste. These and other experiments abun-
dantly confirmed the results already described.

In France Professor Pierre Janet obtained
similar results with a hypnotized subject in
1885 and 1886. Professor Janet and Dr.
Gibert also made a series of experiments with
a sensitive subject at distances varying from
a quarter of a mile to a mile. Here the test
was the production of hypnotic trance in the
subject whenever the distant operator willed
it to occur, at some unexpected time. Out
of twenty-five trials eighteen were completely
successful, and the remainder partially so. It
is needless to refer to the numerous other ex-
periments of a similar kind made by able and
critical observers abroad.

Perhaps the most carefully conducted and
extensive series of experiments upon thought-
transference with a subject in the hypnotic
state were those made at Brighton in 1889

THOUGHT-TRANSFERENCE 79

(by Professor and Mrs. Sidgwick. As usual,
<the most provoking and inexplicable variations
•of success occurred on different days, when
the conditions appeared to be exactly alike;
thus on August 16 and 17 the experiments
were a brilliant success, whereas on August
19, 20 and 21 they were total failures. These
differences could not be accounted for on
grounds of health, etc., for sometimes a run
of success would begin and then abruptly
cease.

The percipient was a clerk, about nineteen
years old, designated as P. To avoid any bias
in the selection of the numbers to be guessed,
the wooden counters of the game of Lotto,
which had the numbers from 10 to 90 stamped
on them, were put into a bag and one drawn
out; as there were thus eighty-one different
numbers, mere chance guessing would give
only one right in eighty-one trials. After the
first few trials, Professor Sidgwick drew the
number from the bag, placed it in a little box,
and handed it, unseen by the percipient, to
Mr. Smith, who kept strict silence; Mrs.
Sidgwick recorded the answer in entire ignor-
ance of the number drawn. It made no
difference whether the percipient P. was blind-
folded or not, as in the hypnotic state, during
these experiments, his eyeballs were turned
upward, his eyelids closed, and normal vision
was impossible ; even so, every precaution was
taken to prevent any information being derived
through the ordinary channels of sense. The
percipient speaks of " seeing " the numbers,

80 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

but this is purely a mental visualization. Here
is a summary of one set of experiments so made,
giving the number drawn in ordinary type, the
number guessed in italics : —

87, almost immediately P. said 87; 19, P.
18; 24, P. I see an 8 and a 4— 84; 35, P. a 3
and a 6—35; 28, P. 88; 20, P. 23 ("not so
plain, I saw the 2 best ") ; 27, P. I see a 7 and
I think a 3 in front of it, I can see the 7 ; 48,
P. I see an 8. Told to look again, P. said he
saw a 4-— the 4 to the left, 48; 20, P. <2 and 0;
71, P. 71; 38, P. 3 . . . 38; 75, P. I see a 7
and a 5 — 75 ; 17, P. after seeing a h said, I
see a 1 first and 7 second; 52, P. 62, I saw
that at once; 76, P. 76.

This is a record of a continuous set of experi-
ments ; the total number of trials made when
the agent and percipient were in the same
room was 644, of which 131 were complete
successes, both digits being given correctly,
and in fourteen trials the digits were given in
the reverse order. Pure guesswork would
have given about eight right, so that mere
chance coincidence cannot account for the
success obtained. In a later series of experi-
ments, carried on from 1890 to 1892, by Mrs.
Sidgwick and Miss Johnson, the agent and
percipient were in different rooms and strict
silence was preserved. I was invited to be
present at some of these trials, and can there-
fore say from personal observation that the
possibility of any information being gained by
the percipient, through unconscious whisper-
ing of the number, seemed to me to be quite

, THOUGHT-TRANSFERENCE 81

excluded, however acute his sense of hearing.
The transference of mental pictures, also with
more or less success, was subsequently tried
Hinder the same conditions, and by the same
experimenters with different percipients.

CHAPTER VII

MESMERISM — HYPNOTISM — SUGGESTION

To most people, any acquaintance with
mesmerism they possess is confined. to those
public exhibitions — common enough a genera-
tion ago, and usually called by the barbarous
word " electro-biology " — where some of the
audience are invited to the platform and made
to look at a small object placed in their hands,
whilst passes are repeatedly made by the
operator down the body of the subject.
Presently two or three fall into a sleep
and readily obey any suggestions, however
ridiculous, made by the operator. In this
way the subject can be made to believe he
is another person, or any bird or animal sug-
gested, often exhibiting a wonderful dramatic
power in carrying out the suggestion. Other
curious phenomena were occasionally shown
by the subject when in a deeper entranced
state, such as complete insensibility to pain
in any part of or over the whole body, while,
on the other hand, he would sometimes
exhibit an amazing exaltation of any special
sense; feeling or detecting things impossible
for him to perceive in his ordinary waking
state. On returning to his normal state, to

82

MESMERISM— HYPNOTISM 83

which he was restored by upward passes
and a command from the operator to " wake
up," he was utterly oblivious of everything
that had occurred during his entranced
condition and was incredulous when informed
of what he had said or done. To the general
public such performances only excited specu-
lation as to their genuineness, and little
regard was paid to the far-reaching psycho-
logical problems involved. Let us briefly
recall the history of the subject.

The remarkable phenomena of mesmerism
originated with a Viennese doctor, Friedrich
Mesmer, a Swiss, born in 1733. Mesmer
claimed to have discovered a new vital fluid
or effluence, which could be transmitted from
one person to another and which, he asserted,
had wonderful curative power. At that time
the physical forces of electricity, magnetism,
heat, etc., were attributed to various im-
palpable fluids, and Mesmer believed he had
found a new fluid or force associated with
life, resembling magnetism : hence he called
it " animal magnetism." Whether such an
effluence exists or not, it certainly has nothing
to do with magnetism as the latter is known
to physical science ; nevertheless, the misnomer
still widely exists.

In 1778 Mesmer came to Paris to demon-
strate his new system of therapeutics. The
use of drugs and other prevalent medical
remedies were abandoned and the patients
submitted to a treatment which looked very
like quackery. Seated round a mysterious

84 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

tub of water, in which were rows of bottles,
the patients, rich and poor, were linked
together by a rope from the tub, and iron
rods proceeding therefrom were brought into
contact with the diseased part, whilst Mesmer
and his assistants stroked or massaged the
patient. Partial darkness and the subdued
strains of music added to the mystery. But
the results were extraordinary, numerous
amazing cures were effected, and Paris rang
with the fame of Mesmer. The patients were
mostly of high standing and included some
physicians of note, one of whom, a " doctor
regent," became Mesmer 's enthusiastic advo-
cate and helper. In one year it is said that
8,000 persons were so treated, and the record of
the cures wrought could neither be explained,
nor explained away, by the medical profession.
A medical commission was appointed in 1784
to report on the whole subject. This com-
mission, which included some famous members
of the Paris Academy of Sciences, was un-
favourable to Mesmer and his fluid theory,
attributing the cures to imagination. But
the commission was much prejudiced against
Mesmer, owing to the secrecy and charlatan-
ism with which he had surrounded his system.
Mesmer thereupon left Paris, followed by
numerous patients, and subsequently died in
obscurity in Switzerland.

Among Mesmer's disciples was the Marquis
de Puyse*gur, who brought a more critical
and scientific spirit to bear upon the subject.
Puysegur ultimately believed the secret of the

MESMERISM— HYPNOTISM 85

cures — which could not be gainsaid, though
they were practically ignored by the medical
commission — to be, as he states, in " belief and
will " or " the action of thought upon the
vital principle of the body." This, in fact, is
generally recognized, and lies at the foundation
of Faith Cures, Christian Science, and the
cures wrought in ancient Greece and Rome
by what is now termed Suggestive treatment.
Puysegur also discovered the state of somnam-
bulism induced in susceptible patients by
Mesmer's system. Such patients were thrown
into a state of trance wherein another per-
sonality with clearer vision and higher facul-
ties appeared to emerge, able to diagnose
their own illness, even prescribe for its treat-
ment, and foresee the date of cure. On
returning to their normal state, not the
slightest memory of what had passed in the
trance state remained. Though unquestion-
able evidence exists of this " lucidity " of the
entranced patient, it is impossible to say how
far the results were merely due to a heightened
but normal sensitiveness, i. e. hypersesthesia,
or to so-called clairvoyance, which we shall
discuss in another chapter.

A later French Medical Commission, ap-
pointed in 1826, reported in favour of this
clairvoyant faculty and of the remarkable
cures effected by mesmerism. This report was,
however, suppressed by the medical faculty
and issued informally. Meanwhile the sub-
ject had been lifted into a different and modern
line of thought by the investigations of an

86 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

able French physician, Dr. A. Bertrand, who
in 1820 published a treatise on artificial som-
nambulism, in which he sweeps away the idea
of animal magnetism and a vital fluid, and
attributes the extraordinary mesmeric cures
to the influence of suggestion on the patient,
who, by the treatment, is made preternaturally
alive to the faintest suggestion expressed, or
even unexpressed, by the operator. Bertrand,
however, records that in the trance state
the subjects have unquestionably a marked
exaltation of their intellectual powers, appar-
ently enabling them to gain a knowledge and
prevision of their malady, often a marvel-
lous appreciation of time, and a community
of sensation between operator and subject.
It is also alleged that a state of clairvoy-
ance, or seeing without eyes, was sometimes
exhibited. Moreover, and this had been
largely overlooked before, complete anaes-
thesia, or absence of sensation, was induced
in the entranced subject.

These were marvels enough and testified to by
weighty authority, albeit they were in general
discredited by the medical profession. Up to
this time England had held aloof from the
subject, regarding it with extreme disfavour.
But, in 1838, an eminent London medical
man, Dr. Elliotson — then professor at, and
senior physician to, University College Hos-
pital— having been convinced by some mes-
meric experiments he had witnessed, took
up the subject with characteristic energy and
enthusiasm. He founded a mesmeric hospital

MESMERISM— HYPNOTISM 87

in London, and also a journal called the Zoist,
which for thirteen years was the organ of the
medical mesmerists — its pages recording not
only the extraordinary cures wrought by
mesmerism, but also many of the more
startling phenomena, such as the community
of sensation between the operator and his
subject, and the clairvoyance noticed by
the early French investigators. In spite of
his high standing, Elliotson's advocacy of
mesmerism caused him to be ostracized by
the medical profession, led to the loss of his
practice, and compelled him to resign the high
official positions he held. The same fate
followed Dr. Esdaile, an able surgeon in India,
appointed, by the Governor-General, Presi-
dency Surgeon at Calcutta. In his six years'
practice in India, and in the mesmeric hospital
he opened in Calcutta, Esdaile performed no less
than 261 serious operations on patients when
under the mesmeric trance, some 200 tumours
were removed, varying from 10 to 103 pounds
in weight ! Not the slightest pain was felt in
any case, and nearly all made a good recovery,
the mortality under such operations being
reduced from 50 to 8 per cent. The discovery
of chloroform was made about this period; the
ease of administering and the certainty of the
operation of this anaesthetic, compared with
the tedious and often uncertain induction of
the mesmeric trance, led to its general adop-
tion, though cases undoubtedly arise where it
would be far safer to employ the mesmeric
trance. The profession, however, would have

88 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

nothing to do with mesmerism, and hounded
out of its ranks any practitioner, however
eminent, who ventured to use what the Lancet,
in 1848, called " this odious fraud."

Hitherto the mesmerists were possessed by
the idea of a peculiar fluid, communicated
to the patient by the passes they employed.
Dr. Braid, a Manchester physician, in 1843
showed that a patient could be entranced
simply by gazing at a bright object. Braid
called this process hypnotism, from the Greek
word for sleep, and this term has now replaced
the word mesmerism, which connotes a special
theory. As was the case with the older
mesmerists, Braid found at first surprising
support for the doctrine of phrenology, when
his patients were entranced; slight pressure
on different parts of the head giving rise to
the exhibition of mental characteristics in the
subject, corresponding with the location of
the so-called organs of language, laughter,
etc., with which phrenologists had mapped
out the skull ! Though the results, which I
myself have repeated, are very curious, the
cause is obscure and may arise from telepathy
or some unconscious suggestion (as Braid sub-
sequently believed) conveyed to the subject
by the operator.

On the Continent, somewhat later, dis-
tinguished physiologists, like Professor C.
Richet, and physicians of note, such as
Dr. Charcot, Liebault, Bernheim and others,
took up the investigation, added largely to
our knowledge, and founded schools for the

MESMERISM— HYPNOTISM 89

study and practice of hypnotism. At Nancy
and elsewhere hypnotic treatment is used
in the hospitals, and the value of this
remedial agent is now generally recognized.
In England, we owe to Dr. Milne Bramwell
and Dr. Lloyd Tuckey the publication of
standard medical works on hypnotism, or
treatment by suggestion. This is not the
place to pursue the medical side of the
question any further ; it will be sufficient to
say that the popular aversion to hypnotism
as a dangerous process is entirely baseless.
Its practice as a remedial agent should, how-
ever, be restricted wholly to qualified medical
men, just as is the use of chloroform or other
powerful narcotics.

Moreover, the incontestable cures effected
by hypnotism, often when other means had
failed, do not always require the subject to be
entranced; monotonous and repeated sugges-
tion can produce the effect even when the
patient remains fully conscious.

In fact, an American practitioner (Proc.
S.P.R., vol. xii.) treats his patients by
silent suggestion, and has published a record
of remarkable cures effected in this way,
which closely resembles the Christian Science
" treatment at a distance," by their healers.

History is full of the miracles of healing
wrought by suggestion. Greatrakes in the
seventeenth century, Gasner in the eighteenth,
Prince Hohenlohe, and other notable faith-
healers, in the nineteenth, all accomplished
wonderful cures without medical skill. To

90 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

say they were due io " suggestion " is merely
to conceal our ignorance of the processes
involved. Suggestion no more explains the
results than the crack of the starting pistol
explains a race. Both are simply signals for
a new departure. The suggestion given by
the operator liberates the subconscious, re-
cuperative, and formative forces within the
organism of the patient. Success consists
in overcoming the difficulty of setting these
forces at work, and often the most effective
way is, as it were, by a flank movement, an
indirect suggestion, and not a direct assault.
That there is a hidden self below the threshold
of consciousness, the subliminal self, has,
we think, been abundantly proved : medical
and psychological research in the future will
doubtless throw more light on this strange and
silent partner of our life.

Some of the most remarkable cures effected
by hypnotic treatment have been in the region
of habits and morals. The drunkard has been
made sober, the idle industrious, and insidious
drug habits overcome. In the dissolution of
self-respect, peculiar to the victims of such
habits, there seems to be, as Mr. Myers
remarks, " nothing on which sage or evangelist
can lay hold. Yet we have seen hypnotic
suggestion effect the magical change and
restore the degraded outcast to a safe
and honourable position among his fellow

men."

The investigation of hypnotism from the
point of view of psychical research was begun

MESMERISM— HYPNOTISM 91

by Mr. Gurney soon after the foundation of the
S.P.R., and his brilliant work in this direction
is of enduring value. Gurney distinguished
three stages in hypnosis — first, the alert stage,
when the subject will, when requested, open
his eyes, answer questions but cannot
originate remarks, is generally sensitive to
pain and will respond to any suggestion, even
when he is half conscious he is making a fool
of himself; next, the deep stage, into which he
will pass with eyeballs rolled upwards, insensi-
tive to pain, but mentally active; this stage
quickly lapses into a profound sleep and
irresponsiveness.

One of the most curious phenomena — the
appreciation of time by the hypnotized subject
— was tested by Gurney, and also by myself,
nearly thirty years ago. A subject was
hypnotized and told to wake up in a certain
number of minutes and then write his name.
There was no timepiece in the room and the
subject had no watch. At the precise minute
he woke and mechanically wrote his name,
wholly ignorant why he did so, nothing being
remembered of the command when the sub-
ject was awake. Again and again we tried,
with periods of longer duration, such as
thirty-two, fifty-five, and ninety-six minutes;
there was not the least mistake and no means
of his gaining any knowledge of the time
by ordinary perception. Dr. Milne Bramwell
has, in recent years, carried this experiment
much further. It is simply necessary to
give the command when the patient is in the

92 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

trance, tell him to write his name, or do any
simple thing, at a given time, and then wake
him up. When questioned he knows nothing
of what he has been ordered to do, but never-
theless fulfils it exactly at the required time.
Thus Dr. Bramwell told a female patient when
entranced to make a cross on a piece of paper
at the end of 7,200 minutes, and mark down
the time she then thought it was without
looking at the timepiece. The time fell due
when the patient was teaching a Sunday-
school class. She suddenly felt an impulse to
make a cross and mark the time. It was only
on looking round at a clock behind her that
she found the time was right ; the number of
minutes had also been estimated with perfect
correctness. Another time she was told, when
entranced, to make a cross in 10,070 minutes.
This suggestion fell due when she was subse-
quently hypnotized by Dr. Bramwell and had
no means of seeing the time. Nevertheless,
exactly at the assigned moment she made a
cross and wrote down the correct time. Out
of fifty-five similar experiments, forty-five
were perfectly successful and only two not
fulfilled. Dr. Mitchell, a Fellow of the Royal
Society of Medicine, and a member of the
Council of the S.P.R., has since corroborated
these results by a large number of well-con-
ducted experiments which were uniformly
successful, though the time interval was some-
times over 200,000 minutes, and sometimes
given in many thousand seconds.
How are these results to be explained ?

MESMERISM— HYPNOTISM 93

There is no question of fraud, continental ob-
servers having obtained the same remarkable
results under test conditions. If hypnotized
before the command is fulfilled, the subject
will remember the order given and tell the
precise number of days, hours and minutes
required to fulfil it. Thus, during hypnosis,
being told to make a cross in 4,580 minutes
and asked how long this was, a subject replied
immediately, three days four hours and twenty
minutes, which is correct, but could not say
how she made the calculation ; the order was
accurately fulfilled at the stated time. The
whole process goes on through the operation of
a subconscious intelligence. Possibly the stated
time is reckoned, and the time as it passes is
noted, unconsciously. On the other hand, the
time of fulfilment sometimes falls due when
the patient is asleep, nevertheless, she awakes
at the correct moment and carries out the
command. In the few experiments I made
long ago, the hypnotized subject, when en-
tranced, told me he watched the time by a
large clock he saw. There was no clock in
the room, nor any clock visible from the
window ; on asking which clock, he said that
on the tower of the Houses of Parliament —
about a quarter of a mile away and impossible
to see from the rooms we were in. This
suggests that some clairvoyant faculty is
unconsciously exercised by the subject, and
this may possibly be the case. Mr Myers
quotes a case where a person, in his ordinary
waking state, occasionally had a similar vision

94 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

of an invisible clock face and saw the exact
time thereon.

Some people have the faculty of awaking
exactly at the definite time they have agreed
upon overnight; here the time-sense, when
not due to a habit, must be a subconscious
estimate of the efflux of time.

The singular exaltation of the intellectual
powers in particular directions is characteristic
of many subjects when hypnotized. Thus a
rather dull lad, during hypnosis, was asked,
in my presence, how many times the letter c
occurred on a page of print suddenly placed
before him, and answered correctly after a
shorter interval than one could count the
number of times that that letter occurred in
a couple of lines. Other experiments were
long sums in arithmetic, correctly and swiftly
done, during hypnosis, which the subject had
failed to do in a longer time in the normal
state. Again (and these were all private
experiments, no question of trickery coming
in), another subject was asked by me to add
up a long row of figures I had jotted down at
random and, at the same time, to count aloud
the odd numbers up to 100. Both acts
were correctly, quickly, and simultaneously
performed; many other similar experiments
were made, illustrating the wonderful exalta-
tion and even dual activity of the mind in
the hypnotized subject. These experiments
remind us of the case of the calculating boys,
to which reference has been made in a previous
chapter.

MESMERISM— HYPNOTISM 95

Another remarkable feature in the hypnotic
trance is that hallucinations can be provoked
either during the trance, or subsequently to it,
by a command from the operator. Thus an
entranced subject, on being told he would see

his friend B at a certain time after he

woke up, when the time came actually
believed he had met and clearly seen the
person named, and related the fact to others,

though fully aware B was at that time in

America or elsewhere. These " post-hypnotic "
hallucinations are of great theoretical interest
in psychical research, as showing that lifelike
phantasms can be created by pure suggestion.

CHAPTER VIII

EXPERIMENTAL AND SPONTANEOUS TELEPATHY
OVER LONG DISTANCES

THE next question that presents itself is,
how far can telepathic impressions be con-
veyed ? We have already referred to numer-
ous successful trials in the hypnotic state when
considerable distances separated the operator
and the subject. In the waking state, experi-
ments have been quoted showing that success
has attended trials when the agent and per-
cipient have been separated by closed doors
and were some yards apart.

A few successful experiments were made in
1892 between two ladies, MissDespard and Miss
Campbell, when the distance was much greater.
The trials were made not only a mile or two
apart in London, but also when the former
was at Surbiton and the latter in London :
the experiments were published by the S.P.R.,
but must be omitted here from want of space.
The Rev. A. Glardon in Switzerland also made
similar experiments between himself in the
Canton Vaud and a friend in Florence.
These are described in vol. i. of Human
Personality, with illustrations of some of the
diagrams thus mentally transferred, many of

96

TELEPATHY 97

the correspondences being singularly good.
But the most systematic and carefully con-
ducted series of experiments, when the agent
and percipient are widely separated, have been
made by my friends, Miss H. Ramsden and
Miss C. Miles. Full details of these experi-
ments were published in the Journal and in
the Proceedings of the S.P.R. for 1906, 1907
and 1908. Miss Miles consulted me about the
best method of conducting the experiments
when they began, and both she and Miss
Ramsden have been scrupulously careful
throughout in following out the suggestions
made. Both ladies are members or associates
of the S.P.R., and are energetic and excellent
investigators. The following is from the
introduction to the first of their joint
papers —

" Miss Ramsden, having met with a certain
amount of success in experiments in thought-
transference with two other friends of hers,
asked Miss Miles to try a systematic series
with her. It was then arranged that Miss
Miles, living at Egerton Gardens, London,
S.W., should play the part of ' agent,' while
Miss Ramsden, at her home, Bulstrode,
Gerard's Cross, Buckinghamshire (about
twenty miles from London), acted as ' per-
cipient,' the times of the experiments being
fixed by pre-arrangement.

" Miss Miles, at the time of each experiment,
noted in a book kept for the purpose the
idea or image which she wished to convey,
while Miss Ramsden wrote down each day

98 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

the impressions that had come into her mind,
and sent the record to Miss Miles before know-
ing what she (Miss M.) had attempted on
her side. Miss Miles then pasted this record
into her book opposite her own notes, and in
some cases added a further note explanatory
of her circumstances at the time, to which
it will be seen that Miss Ramsden's impres-
sions often corresponded. Whenever it was
possible, Miss Miles obtained confirmatory
evidence from other persons as to the circum-
stances that had not been noted at the time,
and the corroboration of these persons was
written in her book and is published."

Having examined the documents, I can
vouch for the conclusive evidence they afford
of the frequent and often surprising trans-
mission of telepathic impressions across the
wide distances that separated the agent
and percipient. The best results appeared to
be obtained when there was no special effort
made by the transmitter — confirming our
previous inference, that it is the sub-
conscious, the subliminal activities, and not
the conscious intelligence, which is operative
in these and other supernormal psychical
phenomena. In fact, Miss Miles writes that
she found it was much easier to impress an
idea without specially concentrating her mind
on it at a fixed time.

Here, for example, is a singularly successful
experiment of this kind. Miss Miles was
attending a meeting of the S.P.R. on the
afternoon of October 27, 1905, and noticed

TELEPATHY 99

the curious pair of spectacles worn by a
gentleman near her. This, she thought, would
be a good subject for her experiment with
Miss Ramsden, and so, on returning home,
she wrote down the word, but did not attempt
to visualize it : " October 27. Spectacles. —
C. M." Miss Ramsden, in Buckinghamshire,
that evening wrote : " October 27. 7 p.m.
Spectacles. This was the only idea that came
to me, after waiting a long time. — H. R."
It is difficult to imagine this to have
been a lucky guess, for Miss Miles does not
wear spectacles. If telepathy be denied, the
objector can only explain the results by
collusion.

Here is another experiment. Miss Miles
noted in her book as the idea she wished to
transmit : " November 2. Hands. — C. M."
Miss Ramsden, twenty miles away at her
own home, wrote : " November 2. 7 p.m. I
began to visualize a little black hand, well
formed." (Some other impressions were also
noted, but Miss Ramsden adds), "the hand
was the most vivid." Miss Miles is an artist
and was drawing in charcoal that afternoon
the hands of a portrait ; Lady Guendolen
Ramsden was staying with her at the time and
confirms this as follows : " Miss Miles was
drawing the hands of the model in the after-
noon.— Guendolen Ramsden." Two other
witnesses also confirm this statement.

Many other experiments were more or less
successful, others, however, were failures ; and
a series tried early in 1906, when Miss Ramsden
D 2

100 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

was in Norway and Miss Miles in London, were
almost all failures. But here there were
disturbing circumstances, which might pos-
sibly have accounted for the disappointing
results.

Another series of experiments was tried later
the same year. Throughout this second series,
which lasted for about a month, from October
19 to November 14, 1906, inclusive, Miss Miles
was again agent and Miss Ramsden percipient.
Miss Miles was staying first near Bristol and
afterwards near Malmesbury, Wiltshire. Miss
Ramsden was living all the time near Kingus-
sie, Inverness-shire, a distance of about four
hundred miles, as the crow flies, from
Bristol.

The general* plan of action was that Miss
Ramsden should keep her mind free from
distraction »about 7 p.m. each day the experi-
ment was tried and think of Miss Miles, then
write down on a postcard any impression that
she received, and post the card to Miss Miles
the next morning. Miss Miles, on her side,
noted briefly on a postcard the principal
impressions made on her during the day and
posted it to Miss Ramsden. In this series
copies of many of the postcards were also
posted simultaneously to me. The postcards
were afterwards pasted together in a book
with notes, the postmarks showing the date
of posting. It should be added that, beyond
knowing that her friend was staying at a
country house near Bristol, Miss Ramsden was
quite ignorant of Miss Miles' doings and

TELEPATHY 101

surroundings, never having been in that part
of England. The results are thus summed up
by the S.P.R. research officer —

" Out of a total of fifteen days' experiments,
the idea that Miss Miles was attempting to
convey, as recorded on her postcards, appeared
on six occasions in a complete or partial form
among Miss Ramsden's impressions on the
same date. But it also happened that almost
every day some of Miss Ramsden's impressions
represented pretty closely something that Miss
Miles had been seeing or talking about on the
same day. In other words, while the agent
only succeeded occasionally in transferring
the ideas deliberately chosen by her for the
purpose, the percipient seemed often to have
some sort of supernormal knowledge of her
friend's surroundings, irrespective of what that
friend had specially wished her to see. . . .

" It has to be considered how many of the
successes might be mere guesses, whose
correctness was due to chance and not to
telepathy. After studying all the records,
however, it appears to us that while some of
the coincidences of thought between the two
experimenters are probably accidental, the
total amount of correspondence is more than
can be thus accounted for and points distinctly
to the action of telepathy between them."

This is the opinion of a skilled and severe
critic, and it is fully borne out by a careful
perusal of the published records. The reader
should note that all the experiments were
given in full, not a favourable selection, and

102 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

that Miss Miles' record was always made
before she heard what Miss Ramsden's impres-
sions were. When one thinks of the thousands
of things that might be selected for the purpose
of the experiment, the fact of any agreement
between the two records is suggestive, but
when we find frequent remarkable agreements,
the only inference is that one mind must in
some way have communicated its impression
to the other, four hundred miles away.

Further, and occasionally, very striking
evidence of long-distance telepathy is given
in a series of experiments between the same
two ladies during the summer of 1907. Miss
Miles was then on a sketching tour with Lady
Ramsden in the Ardennes, and Miss Ramsden
was staying at her father's country house in
the Highlands of Scotland.

On returning to England Miss Miles went
to Newbury in Berkshire for some painting
lessons, and stayed in lodgings, her landlady
having a delicate little girl in whom Miss
Miles was much interested. Unaware of the
existence of this child, Miss Ramsden writes
from the Highlands on a postcard to Miss
Miles—

" October 31, 1907. I think you wish me
to see a little girl with brown hair down her
back, tied with a ribbon in the usual way.
She is sitting at a table with her back turned
and seems busy . . . cutting out scraps with
a pair of scissors. She has on a white pina-
fore, and I should guess her age to be between
eight and twelve.— H. R."

TELEPATHY 103

Here is the description of the child written
by Miss Miles' landlady, Mrs. Lovegrove : "I
have a little girl, aged eleven, with brown hair
tied with a ribbon ; she wears a pinafore and,
being ill, amuses herself by cutting out scraps.
I had along talk [about her ?] with Miss Miles
on October 31. — L. Lovegrove."

During the latter part of 1908, Miss Ramsden
made numerous similar experiments on tele-
pathy at a distance between herself, who now
acted as " agent," and another lady who
acted as " percipient." These experiments
are described in the Journal of the S.P.R. for
December 1910, and contain additional evi-
dence of the telepathic transmission of ideas
and mental impressions over considerable
distances. We may, therefore, take it as
experimentally proved, beyond reasonable
doubt, that telepathy can bridge great dis-
tances of space. Shakespeare, in one of his
sonnets, anticipated this —

ff If the dull substance of my flesh was thought,
Injurious distance would not stop the way."

This is a delightful anticipation for parted
friends if telepathy became more widespread.

Now let us pass from these direct experiments
to spontaneous cases : that is to say, to the
evidence afforded by numerous trustworthy
witnesses of the occurrence of some event,
painful or otherwise, to one person, and the
simultaneous perception of it by another per-
son some distance away. Here, for instance,

104 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

is a case of a trivial occurrence, but interesting
as illustrating how a passive state in the
percipient, especially the transition between
sleeping and waking, favours the reception
and emergence into consciousness of a tele-
pathic impact, as this appears to be. Note
also that the incident is well attested, that
the coincidence in time was evidently very
close, and the account itself was sent to the
S.P.R. on the very day that the incident
occurred, accompanied by a letter from Mr.
Harrison stating that " Everything happened
exactly as stated.5'

"February!, 1891.

" I reside with my husband at 15 Lupton
Street, N.W. This afternoon I was lying on
the sofa, sound asleep, when I suddenly
awoke, thinking I heard my husband sigh as
if in pain. I arose immediately, expecting
to find him in the room. He was not there,
and, looking at my watch, I found it was half-
past three. At six o'clock my husband came
in. He called my attention to a bruise on
his forehead, which was caused by his having
knocked it against the stone steps in a Turkish
bath. I said to him, ' I know when it
happened — it was at half-past three, for I
heard you sigh as if in pain at the time.'
He replied, ' Yes, that was the exact time,
for I remember noticing the clock directly
after.'

44 The gentleman who appends his name as

TELEPATHY 105

witness was present when this conversation
took place.

" LOUISA E. HARRISON.

" Witness : Henry Hooton, 23 Bunhill Row,
E.C."

A very similar case was sent to the S.P.R.
by Mr. Ruskin. The percipient was Mrs.
Arthur Severn, the wife of the well-known
landscape painter, who, writing from Brant-
wood, Coniston, states that one morning she
woke up with a start, feeling that she had
had a hard blow on her mouth, and with a
distinct sense that she had been cut and her
upper lip bleeding. She held her pocket
handkerchief to the place, and was surprised
when she removed it not to see any blood.
Then she realized that nothing could have
struck her as she lay asleep in bed and that
it must have been a dream. Looking at her
watch, she found it was seven o'clock, and
hence, as her husband was not in the room,
concluded he must have gone for an early
sail on the lake.

At breakfast- time, about 9.30, Mr. Severn
came in, holding his handkerchief to his lip,
and on being questioned told his wife that a
sudden squall came on whilst he was in the
boat, causing the tiller to swing round and hit
him a severe blow on the upper lip, which was
cut rather badly and would not stop bleeding.
When asked when this occurred, he replied
it must have been about seven o'clock. Mr.
Severn corroborates this account, the fuller

106 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

details of which are given in Phantasms of the
Living, vol. i., p. 188.

Many other similar cases resting on first-
hand evidence might be quoted. Even more
common than the telepathic transmission of
pain are the numerous well-attested records
where some auditory or visual impression
has been transferred to great distances. Here
is one such case, quoted not only for its
brevity, but also because a written record of
the incident was made and sent off by the
percipient before anything was known of
what had really occurred.

Miss King, at Exeter, one Sunday morning
at four o'clock, was awakened by hearing the
words, "Come to me, Trix; I'm so ill." She
stated to the S.P.R. research officer, Miss
Johnson, who investigated the case, that it
was just like a real person speaking, and she
recognized the voice as that of her friend Miss
Ridd, who was the only person that called her
'' Trix," and she felt it could be no one else.
She was so much impressed that the same day
she wrote to Miss Ridd — who was then in
London, two hundred miles away — and related
the incident. Miss Ridd, by return of post, re-
plied as follows, in a letter which had been kept
and was shown : " I didn't mean to tell you
about it, but the coincidence is so strange I
must. Sunday morning about four o'clock I
had an awfully bad pain, and thought I was
going to die for a few minutes ; when I could
speak, I stretched out my arms to your photo
and said, 'My Trix, come to me; I'm so ill,

TELEPATHY 107

come to me ! ' Wasn't it strange ? " It
should be added that there was no expectation
of Miss Ridd's sudden illness (angina pectoris)
at the time it occurred, as she had not had an
attack for some time (Proc. S.P.R., x. 290).

It would be tiresome, even if space allowed,
to quote the large number of similar cases,
supported by first-hand evidence, which are
published in the records of the S.P.R. The
body of evidence is like a faggot — a single
stick may be broken, but the whole bundle
has a strength which resists fracture. Year
by year this bundle is gaining in volume and
solidity, and the most captious critic, though
he may find a weak case here and there,
cannot break down the accumulated evidence
afforded by the whole.

How telepathy is propagated We have not
the remotest idea. Certainly it is not likely
to be through any material medium or by any
physical agency known to us. The existence
of wireless telegraphy and the bridging of
vast spaces by messages transmitted in this
way naturally suggest that thought might
likewise be transmitted by a similar system
of ether waves, which some have called " brain
waves." And there is no doubt the fact of
wireless telegraphy has made telepathy more
widely credible and popular. As remarked on
a previous page, hostility to a new idea arises
largely from its being unrelated to existing
knowledge. As soon as we see, or think we
see, some relation or resemblance to what we

108 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

already know, hostility of mind changes to
hospitality, and we have no further doubt
of the truth of the new idea. It is not so
much evidence that convinces men of some-
thing entirely foreign to their habit of thought,
as the discovery of a link between the new and
the old.

Let us, therefore, for a moment examine this
analogy of telepathy to wireless telegraphy.
Even if we assume the so-called " brain waves "
to be infinitely minute waves in the ether that
fills all space, they would still obey what is
called " the law of inverse squares," that is
to say, spreading on every side in ever expand-
ing waves, they would decay in proportion
to the square of the distance from their source.
Thus, at a thousand yards away from the source,
the effect produced on any receiver would be
a million times less than the effect upon the
same receiver a yard away from the originating
source. Hence, to transmit waves over great
distances through free space requires tre-
mendous energy in the originating source of
these waves, otherwise the waves would be so
enfeebled when they reached the receiver that
it could not detect them. Now we have no
evidence to show that any tremendous mental
effort is required on the part of the agent
when experiments on thought transference —
such as between Miss Miles and Miss Ramsden
— are conducted at great distances apart. And
what, on the brain-wave theory, must be the
mental energy emanating from a dying person
to transmit a mental impression from himself

TELEPATHY 109

to a friend on the other side of the globe ? for
such cases are on record.

There are several other reasons that could
be urged against any physical mode of
transmitting telepathy, thus the incidence
of " brain waves," if such existed, would be
felt by great numbers of people and not by
one or two percipients, as is the case, and they
would only create a faint, but exact, image of
their source, which is not the case in tele-
pathy.

The fact is, in my opinion, the supernormal
phenomena we are discussing in this little
book do not belong to the material plane,
and therefore the laws of the physical uni-
verse are inapplicable to them. It is hope-
less to attempt thus to explain telepathy and
other phenomena which transcend knowledge
derived from our sense perceptions, — though
these latter are the foundation of physical
science and the proper guide for our daily
business here on earth.

It is highly probable that the conscious
waking self of those concerned takes no part
in the actual telepathic transmission. The
idea or object thought of in some way
impresses the subliminal self of the agent,
and this impression is transferred, doubtless
instantaneously across space, to the inner
subconscious self of the percipient. Here,
however, a favourable moment may have to
be awaited before the outer or conscious self
can be stimulated into activity; for delay
in the emergence of the impression is often

110 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

noted. It is quite possible, therefore, that
if we knew how to effect this transfer, unfail-
ingly and accurately, from the outer to the
inner self and vice versa, telepathy would
become a universal and common method of
communicating thought. This may be the
case in the unseen world, when —

ft As star to star vibrates light, may soul to soul
Strike thro' a finer element of her own."

In the next chapter we must examine the
subject of apparitions, and shall find in many
of these cases additional evidence of telepathy.

CHAPTER IX

VISUAL HALLUCINATIONS : PHANTASMS
OF THE LIVING AND DEAD

To most people the word " hallucination "
means some delusion, or error of the mind,
and nothing more. There are, of course,
hallucinations of the insane and in delirium,
where there is no objective reality whatever
underlying the phantasm conjured up by the
diseased mind. There are also hallucinations
experienced by sane and healthy minds ; some
person is seen, or something is felt, or words
are heard, for which there is no material cause.
The mind receives the hallucination as if it
came through the channels of sense, and
accordingly externalizes the impression, seek-
ing its source in the world outside itself,
whereas in all hallucinations the source is
within the mind and is not derived from an
impression received through the recognized
organ of sense.

Many hallucinations are due to some slight
morbid affection of the brain, and their origin
is a pathological study; but some hallucina-
tions correspond with an appropriate real event
occurring to another person; some accident,
ill

112 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

illness, emotion or death happening at that
time to a distant friend. Such hallucinations
are termed veridical or truth-telling; their
study is a branch of psychology, and is an
important part of psychical research. There
may be no more substantiality about such
visual hallucinations than there is about the
reflection of oneself in a looking-glass. The
image in the mirror is veridical and caused by
a neighbouring objective reality ; a " veridical
hallucination," in like manner, is a mental
image coinciding with some distant unseen real
occurrence ; but the mental image is not derived
through the organs of sense, as is the reflection
seen in a mirror. It is in fact due to some
impression made, otherwise than through the
channels of sense, on the higher tracts of the
brain, which then projects the impression
into the outer world. In this it differs from
an illusion where a slight external cause, per-
ceived by the senses, may start an imaginary
phantom.

Now there is unquestionable evidence that
visual hallucinations can be produced tele-
pathically. Thus a friend, and member of the
Council of the S.P.R., the late Rev. W. S. Moses
— more widely known only as ' M. A. Oxon ' —
one night desired to appear to a friend some
miles distant, who was not informed before-
hand of the intended experiment. At the
very time his friend saw Mr. Moses appear
before him, and as he gazed in astonishment,
the figure faded away. A second time the
experiment was repeated, with equal success.

VISUAL HALLUCINATIONS 113

A year or two later, Mr. S. H. Beard (well
known to myself and others then on the
Council of the S.P.R.) made a series of similar
experiments, with equal success. The facts
were investigated by Mr. Gurney, and fresh
experiments made with success under his
direction; full details of the evidence will be
found in vol. i. of Phantasms of the Living.
On one occasion, the phantom of Mr. Beard
was seen and recognized by two persons in the
room, simultaneously, who were unaware of
the fact that Mr. Beard, some miles away,
was then trying, by an effort of will, to appear
to them. These results seemed at first almost
incredible, but complete confirmation of them
has been obtained from independent experi-
ments made by others. In such cases the
" agent " whose phantasm is seen is usually
about to sleep, or is asleep, at the time of the
apparition, although the wish to appear may
have been formed earlier in the waking
state.

Unless we reject all testimony, or attribute
the numerous cases investigated to some
illusion, there can be no doubt that a distant
person can, by his directed thought, or by
dream, create a phantom of himself in the
mind of a distant percipient. This suggests a
general explanation of those visual hallucina-
tions, or apparitions, at the moment of death,
which are supported by abundant first-hand
evidence.

Now if a sane and healthy person sees a
phantom of his friend B. at the moment when

114 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

B., a hundred miles away, was unexpectedly
dying, we should rightly conclude, if this
case stood alone, that it was simply a chance
coincidence. Many hallucinations occur, which
do not coincide with any particular event, and
one which does do so is more likely to be re-
membered and talked of than the others. But
what if investigation shows that there are hun-
dreds of cases, well substantiated, where an
apparition of B. is seen (or hallucination of some
kind suggesting B. is perceived), and that this
closely coincides with the time when the distant
friend B. was dying, or suffering from a mental
shock. When, moreover, before the hallucina-
tion there was no knowledge of B.'s state, nor
anything to suggest B. Now this is precisely
what has been ascertained by the S.P.R. Over
two hundred cases of apparitions at or about
the time of death, resting upon first-hand and
unimpeachable evidence, have been collected
and published in the two large volumes en-
titled Phantasms of the Living, the chief author
of which was that brilliant and able man,
Edmund Gurney. What conclusion can we
draw from this except that some connection
exists between the phantasm and the distant
person who is dying ? And in many cases the
simplest explanation of this connection is that
afforded by telepathy, though other cases lead
us to infer what Mr. Myers calls an excursive
action of the spirit, which in some way renders
its presence manifest to the percipient.

In physical science we also meet with the
problem of coincidences. Thus in the spectrum

VISUAL HALLUCINATIONS 115

of the sun it was noticed long ago that there
were hundreds of transverse fine black lines
running across the spectrum from the red end
to the violet. These were for many years a
mystery. Then it was discovered that in the
spectrum of terrestrial metals there were
numerous fine bright lines. It was found that
the two bright yellow lines of sodium exactly
coincided with two black lines in the yellow
of the solar spectrum. That may have been
a chance coincidence. But it was soon dis-
covered that the hundreds of fine bright lines
in the spectrum of iron vapour exactly co-
incided in position with hundreds of fine black
lines in the solar spectrum. This could not
possibly be due to chance, as the "law of
probability " demonstrates ; so there must be
some causal, not casual, connection between
the two; this was confirmed when many
other exact correspondences were discovered
between terrestrial and solar spectra. These
facts, coupled with the known reciprocity of
radiation and absorption, established the
existence of the vapour of numerous terrestrial
elements in the atmosphere enveloping the sun
and fixed stars.

Science, by a study of coincidences, has
annihilated space and definitely arrived at the
knowledge of the composition of heavenly
bodies, millions upon millions of miles distant
from the earth.

Can we do for psychical science what has
been done for physical science ? Are the
coincidences in time of hallucinations with

116 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

some distant event suggested by them, — suf-
ficiently numerous and exact to warrant a
conclusion with a confidence such as the
coincidences in space, in the lines of terrestrial
and stellar spectra, has afforded to physical
science ?

The problem which Edmund Gurney first
attempted to solve was to obtain a numerical
comparison of veridical hallucinations with
those which were purely accidental. When
the relative frequency of these two classes is
ascertained, the probability of mere chance
coincidence being the cause of the former can
be calculated. By a " census of hallucina-
tions," begun in 1884, Edmund Gurney ob-
tained from nearly six thousand adults replies
to the question " whether during the preceding
ten years they had experienced, when in good
health and wide awake, a vivid impression of
seeing or being touched by a human being, or
hearing a voice which suggested a human
presence, when no one was there." After his
death, a similar but more elaborate census
was undertaken (with the approval of the In-
ternational Congress of Experimental Psycho-
logy) by a committee of the S.P.R., over
which Professor H. Sidgwick presided. This
committee, in answer to a question similar
to the above, except that no time limit was
named, received written replies from seventeen
thousand adults.

Careful and critical investigation of the
affirmative replies led both Edmund Gurney
and the committee to conclude that pure

VISUAL HALLUCINATIONS 117

chance could not account for the number of
cases which showed a close coincidence between
the time of death and the apparition of a dying
person recognized by the distant percipient.
The committee found that, making amplest
allowance for various sources of error, the
proportion of veridical (i. e. coincidental cases)
to the meaningless (i. e. non-coincidental cases)
is 440 times greater than pure chance would
give ; a result which they stated in the following
cautious words : " Between deaths and appa-
ritions of the dying person a connection exists
which is not due to chance alone. This we
hold as a proved fact. The discussion of its
full implications cannot be attempted in this
paper; — nor perhaps exhausted in this age."
(Report in S.P.R. Proceedings, vol. x., p. 394;
the reader should consult this volume, which
is devoted to a critical discussion of this
important census.)

Such a result disposes once for all of the
common explanation : " It was just an odd
chance that the apparition happened to co-
incide with the death of that particular per-
son ; " the hits being remembered, and the
misses forgotten. In fact, before arriving at
the calculation above given, the committee
made an almost extravagant allowance for
forgetfulness in the latter case, and exaggera-
tion in the former.

The statistical evidence is not, however,
the argument that appeals most to the general
public. Any person who has seen for himself
an apparition, which he recognized as that of

118 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

a distant friend, and who afterwards found the
time of the appearance to have coincided with
the unexpected death of his friend, would be
far more impressed by that single fact than
by any statistics. This is also true of those
who merely hear of such a case from intimate
friends. It is much to be desired that every
percipient of any hallucination should, before
he knows whether it has any significance, make
and show to some other person a written
memorandum; thus precluding the objection
often raised by sceptics, that there is no docu-
mentary evidence of his previous ignorance
of the crisis through which his friend was
passing when he experienced the hallucination.
Unfortunately, people do not as a rule write
down these experiences and send them to
friends; but as communications of the kind
are now taken more seriously, we may hope
that this will become more common. Even
as it is, there are not wanting cases authenti-
cated by evidence of this very kind. The
committee, for instance, gives seventeen evi-
dential cases which were noted at the time by
the percipient.

In the following case a note of the apparition
seen shortly before death was made at the
time, and preserved by the percipient, when
she had no knowledge of the brief, fatal illness
of the deceased. The percipient, Miss Hervey,
then staying in Tasmania with Lady H., had
just come in from a ride in excellent health
and spirits, and was leaving her room up-stairs
to have tea with Lady H., when she saw

VISUAL HALLUCINATIONS 119

coming up the stairs the figure of her cousin,
a nurse in Dublin, to whom she was much
attached. She at once recognized the figure,
which was dressed in grey, and without waiting
to see it disappear, she hurried to Lady H.,
whom she told what she had seen. Lady H.
laughed at her, but told her to note it down
in her diary, which she did. Diary and note
were seen by the critical Mr. Podmore, who
investigated the case on behalf of the S.P.R.
The note ran as follows : " Saturday, April
21, 1888, 6 p.m. Vision of (giving her
cousin's nickname) on landing in grey dress."
In June news of this cousin's unexpected death
reached Miss Hervey in Tasmania. She died
in a Dublin hospital from typhus fever on
April 22, 1888. A letter, written the same
day, giving an account of Miss Ethel B.'s
death, was sent to Miss Hervey, preserved
by her, and seen by Mr. Podmore. It states
that the crisis of the illness began at 4 a.m. on
the 22nd, but that Miss B. lingered on for
twelve hours, dying at 4.30 p.m. As the
difference oi time between Tasmania and
Dublin is about ten hours, the apparition
preceded the actual death by some thirty-two
hours. The kind of dress worn by the nurses
in the hospital was unknown to Miss Hervey,
and was found to be of a greyish tone when
seen from a little distance. The phantom
made so vivid an impression on Miss Hervey
that, on the evening she saw it, she wrote a
long letter to her cousin in Dublin telling her
about it. This letter arrived some six weeks

120 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

after her death, and was returned to the
writer. (Proc. S.P.R., vol. x., p. 282.)

The next case is of high evidential value,
the impression, which was unique in the per-
cipient's experience, having been at once com-
municated to a third person, whose testimony
to that point we have obtained; the coin-
cidence in time was certainly close to within
a very few minutes, and perhaps exact. Mr.
S., the percipient, who was personally known
to Mr. Gurney, and occupied a position of
considerable responsibility, did not wish his
name to be published, but permitted it to be
given to inquirers, and offered to answer any
questions personally. (See Phantasms of the
Living, vol. i., p. 210.)

Mr. S. and Mr. F. L. had been colleagues in
an office and intimate friends for about eight
years, entertaining for one another a very
great regard and esteem. On Monday, March
19, 1883, Mr. F. L., on coming to the office,
complained of having suffered from indigestion.
On Saturday he was absent, and, as Mr. S.
afterwards learned, was seen by a medical man,
who thought he wanted a day or two of rest,
but expressed no opinion that anything was
seriously amiss.

On Saturday evening, March 24, Mr. S.,
who had a headache, was at home, sitting on
a couch at the shaded side of the room lit by
a gas chandelier, under which, in the middle
of the room, his wife sat reading. Having
remarked to her that for the first time for
months he felt rather too warm, he leaned

VISUAL HALLUCINATIONS 121

back on the couch, and the next minute saw
Mr. F. L. standing before him, dressed as
usual. Mr. S. noticed that he was wearing
his black-banded hat, his overcoat un-
buttoned, and carried a stick. He looked
fixedly at Mr. S., and then passed away. At
the moment Mr. S. felt an icy chill, and his
hair bristled. He quoted to himself from
Job : " And lo, a spirit passed before me, and
the hair of my flesh stood up."

Turning then to his wife, who had been
looking in another direction, and had seen
nothing, he asked her the time. She said,
" Twelve minutes to nine." He said, " I asked
because F. L. is dead. I have just seen him."
She tried to persuade him that it was fancy ; but
he persisted that he had seen Mr. F. L., and
was sure of his death. She noticed that he
looked much agitated and very pale. He was
afterwards struck by his own instant certainty,
with nothing to suggest the idea, of his friend's
death, and by his acceptance of the incident as
a matter of course, without feeling surprise.

On Sunday afternoon, about three o'clock,
Mr. F. L.'s brother, A., called with the news at
Mr. S.'s house. It had occurred to him on the
way that Mr. S. would probably have a presenti-
ment of F. L.'s death owing to the strong
sympathy between them. Seeing that this
was the case, when Mr. S. met him at the door,
he said : " I suppose you know what I have
come to tell you ? " Mr. S. replied : " Yes,
your brother is dead," and told of his vision
on the previous evening.

122 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

Mr. A. L. on Saturday about 8 p. in. had
visited his brother F., whom he found sitting up
in his room. Leaving him about 8.40, apparently
much better, Mr. A. L. went down to the dining-
room, where he stayed with his sister for about
half-an-hour, and then left, upon which his sis-
ter immediately went up-stairs, and found her
brother F. lying dead on his bed from rupture of
the aorta. His death must therefore have oc-
curred either a few minutes before or after
9 p.m.

There had never been any thought-trans-
ference between him and Mr. S., who had never
seen an apparition before, nor believed in
them. Mr. A. L. describes himself as "no
believer in visions." Mr. Gurney calculates
the odds against such an event being due to
mere chance coincidence as 208,000,000 to 1.

Sometimes the phantom is not only seen
but heard, and may be regarded as an auditory
as well as visual hallucination. The following
striking case, though remote in point of time,
is so well attested as to be worth quoting. It
is from Mrs. Richardson of Combe Down,
Bath, who gave Mr. Gurney a viva voce account
precisely as here recorded. (See Phantasms
of the Living, vol. i., p. 443.) Mrs. Richardson
described herself as a matter-of-fact person,
and not given to frequent or vivid dreams.

" August 26, 1882.

"On September 9, 1848, at the siege of
Mooltan, my husband, Major-General Richard-

VISUAL HALLUCINATIONS 123

son, C.B., then adjutant of his regiment, was
most severely and dangerously wounded, and
supposing himself dying, asked one of the
officers with him to take the ring off his finger
and send it to his wife, who, at that time, was
fully 150 miles distant, at Ferozepore. On
the night of September 9, 1848, I was lying
ci>n my bed, between sleeping and waking,
when I distinctly saw my husband being
carried off the field, seriously wounded, and
heard his voice saying, ' Take this ring off
my finger, and send it to my wife.' All the
next day I could not get the sight or the voice
out of my mind. In due time I heard of
General Richardson having been severely
wounded in the assault on Mooltan. He sur-
vived, however, and is still living. It was not
for some time after the siege that I heard from
Colonel L., the officer who helped to carry
General Richardson off the field, that the
request as to the ring was actually made to
him, just as I had heard it at Ferozepore at that
very time;

"M. A. RICHARDSON."

General Richardson, in answer to Mr. Gur-
uey's inquiries, stated that he distinctly re-
membered the incident. He was wounded
in the evening of September 9, and taking the
ring off his finger, said to the late Major Lloyd,
who was supporting him : " Send this to my
wife," or words to that effect. He had not
promised before leaving home to send her the
ring, nor had he expressed any presentiment

124 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

of being hurt. As Mr. Myers remarks, " The
detail about the ring seems fairly to raise the
case out of the category of mere visions of
absent persons who are known to be in danger,
and with whom the percipient's thoughts have
been anxiously engaged."

In the following case the percipient appeared
to be transported to the actual scene of the
event, and observed some minute details
(afterwards verified) of inanimate objects
around, somewhat as in a crystal vision.
Such cases suggest the phenomena of clair-
voyance, when the percipient's powers of
vision extend far beyond the range of their
organs of sight, the information so obtained
being independent of the thought passing in
the minds of others. Here, however, it seems
possible that the phenomena may have been
due to an " excursive action " on the part of
the decedent's spirit.

"On October 24, 1889, Edmund Dunn,
brother of Mrs. Agnes Paquet, was serving as
fireman on the tug Wolf, a small steamer
engaged in towing vessels in Chicago Harbour.
At about 3 o'clock a.m. the tug fastened to a
vessel, inside the piers, to tow her up the river.
While adjusting the tow-line, Mr. Dunn fell
or was thrown overboard by the tow-line, and
drowned."

MRS. PAQUET'S STATEMENT

fc< I arose about the usual hour on the morning
of the accident, probably about six o'clock.

VISUAL HALLUCINATIONS 125

I had slept well throughout the night, had
no dreams or sudden awakenings. I awoke
feeling gloomy and depressed, which feeling
I could not shake off. After breakfast my
husband went to his work, and, at the proper
time, the children were gotten ready and sent
to school, leaving me alone in the house. Soon
after this I decided to steep and drink some
tea, hoping it would relieve me of the gloomy
feelings afore-mentioned. I went into the
pantry, took down the tea-canister, and as I
turned around my brother Edmund — or his
exact image — stood before me and only a few
feet away. The apparition stood with back
towards me, or, rather, partially so, and was in
the act of falling forward — away from me —
seemingly impelled by two ropes or a loop of
rope drawing against his legs. The vision
lasted but a moment, disappearing over a
low railing or bulwark, but was very distinct.
I dropped the tea, clasped my hands to
iny face and exclaimed, ' My God ! Ed. is
drowned ! '

" At about 10.30 a.m. my husband received
a telegram from Chicago, announcing the drown-
ing of my brother. When he arrived home he
said to me, 4 Ed. is sick in hospital at Chicago ;
I have just received a telegram,' to which I
replied, ' Ed. is drowned ; I saw him go over-
board. ' I then gave him a minute description
of what I had seen. I stated that my brother,
as I saw him, was bareheaded, had on a heavy
blue sailor's shirt, no coat, and that he went
over the rail or bulwark. I noticed that his

126 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

pants' legs were rolled up enough to show the
white lining inside. I also described the ap-
pearance of the boat at the point where my
brother went overboard.

" I am not nervous, and neither before nor
since have I had any experience in the least
degree similar to that above related.

" My brother was not subject to fainting or
vertigo.

" AGNES PAQUET."

Mr. Paquet corroborates his wife's state-
ment on all points. He went at once to
Chicago, where he found that the appearance
of the vessel, which his wife had never seen,
was exactly as she had described it ; while the
crew confirmed her accounts of her brother's
dress, " except that they thought he had had
his hat on at the time of the accident. They
said that he had purchased a pair of pants a
few days before, and as they were a trifle long,
wrinkling at the knees, had worn them rolled
up, showing the white lining, as seen by my
wife."

Upon this case (see Proc. S.P.R., vol. vii.,
p. 34) Mrs. Sidgwick remarks—

" Here Mrs. Paquet not only had a vivid
impression of her brother within a few hours
of his death — not only knew that he was dead
—but saw a more or less accurate representa-
tion of the scene of his death.

" It will have been noticed that her impres-
sion was not contemporaneous with the event
to which it related, but occurred some six hours

VISUAL HALLUCINATIONS 127

afterwards. It was preceded by a feeling of
depression with which she had awoken in the
morning, and one is at first tempted to suppose
that she had dreamed of the event and for-
gotten it, and that her subsequent vision was
the result of a sudden revivification of the dream
in her memory. But we do not know enough
to justify us in assuming this, and against such
a hypothesis may be urged the experience of
Mrs. Storie, related in Phantasms of the Living
(voL i., p. 370), which somewhat resembles
Mrs. Paquet's. Mrs. Storie tells us that all
the evening she felt unusually nervous, and
then, when she went to bed, she had a remark-
able dream, in which she saw a series of scenes
which afterwards turned out to have a clear
relation to the death of her brother, who had
been killed by a passing train four hours earlier.
In her case the nervousness cannot be regarded
as telepathic, as it is stated to have begun
before the accident, but it seems quite possible
that the nervousness and depression may have
had to do with some condition in the percipient
which rendered the vision possible."

A curious case, also involving the produc-
tion of a kind of picture, which, having been
seen by several people simultaneously, comes
under the head of a " collective hallucination,"
is related by Mr. C. A. W. Lett (Phantasms of
the Living, vol. ii., p. 213) : —

" On the 5th April, 1873, my wife's father,
Captain Towns, died at his residence, Cran-
brook, Rose Bay, near Sydney, N.S. Wales.

128 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

About six weeks after his death my wife had
occasion, one evening about nine o'clock, to

§o to one of the bedrooms in the [above] house,
he was accompanied by a young lady, Miss
Berthon, and as they entered the room — the
gas was burning all the time — they were
amazed to see, reflected as it were on the
polished surface of the wardrobe, the image of
Captain Towns. It was barely half-figure,
the head, shoulders, and part of the arms only
showing — in fact, it was like an ordinary
medallion portrait, but life-size. The face
appeared wan and pale, as it did before his
death, and he wore a kind of grey flannel
jacket, in which he had been accustomed to
sleep. Surprised and half alarmed at what
they saw, their first idea was that a portrait
had been hung in the room, and that what
they saw was its reflection; but there was no
picture of the kind. . . .

" C. A. W. LETT."

The phantom portrait was immediately
afterwards seen and recognized by Captain
Towns' unmarried daughter, by his old body-
servant, by the butler, by the nurse, by a
housemaid, and finally by his widow, who
passed her hand over the panel of the ward-
robe, whereupon the figure gradually faded
away, and never reappeared. The recognition
of the appearance on the part of each was
independent, and not due to any suggestion
from the others. The case is attested by Mrs.
Lett and Miss Towns, and much resembles

VISUAL HALLUCINATIONS 129

the vivid and sometimes collective hallucina-
tion seen in crystal- vision (p. 141).

In the foregoing cases, no purpose on the
part of the agent can be inferred, beyond that
of self-manifestation or announcement of
death. There are, however, a considerable
group of cases where the apparition communi-
cates some definite information, hitherto un-
known to the percipient. Only a brief mes-
sage seems possible, and it is one probably
felt by the deceased person to be of urgent
importance. The evidence upon which such
cases rest of course needs to be sifted with the
utmost care, and this has been done in the
following well-attested instance, of which we
can only give a bare outline; the case is
corroborated by different witnesses, and is
fully reported and discussed in the S.P.R.
Proceedings, vol. viii., p. 200 el seq.

In February 1891, Michael Conley, a farmer
living in Iowa, U.S.A., died suddenly at
Dubuque, about 100 miles from his home.
After the inquest at Dubuque the old clothes
which he had been wearing were thrown away,
and his son brought home the body. On
hearing of her father's death, his daughter
Lizzie fell into a swoon, in which she remained
for several hours. When she recovered con-
sciousness she said : " Where are father's old
clothes ? He has just appeared to me dressed
in a white shirt, black clothes, and satin slip-
pers, and told me that after leaving home he
sewed a large roll of bills inside his grey shirt
with a piece of my red dress, and the money

E

130 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

is still there." This description of her father's
burial clothes, which she had not seen, was
quite correct; but neither she, nor anybody
else, had known anything of the pocket and
money in the shirt. To pacify her, her
brother went back the 100 miles to Dubuque,
where he found the old clothes were lying in
a shed. In the shirt was found a large roll of
bills, amounting to thirty-five dollars, sewed
with a piece of red cloth, exactly like Lizzie's
dress, the stitches being large and irregular, as
if made by a man. Telepathy from living
minds might account for her accurate know-
ledge about the unseen burial garments, but
not for her statement about the secreted
money, of which all the family were ignorant.
It is a curious fact that children are not
infrequently impressed with some veridical
hallucination. In the following case a little
girl seems to have been utilized as an auto-
matic machine, so to speak, and caused to
utter words which for her can hardly have
had any meaning : —

"King*a Ferry, New York.

" On the afternoon of January 2nd, 1867,
my little daughter, Augusta, aged three years,
was playing with her dolly, sitting near her
aunt, who was spending the day at my house
in New York. Her little cousins, Darius and
David Adams, aged eleven and nine years,
to the younger of whom she was tenderly
attached, were living in Penn Yan, New York,

VISUAL HALLUCINATIONS 131

250 miles away. The cousins had not met
since the preceding summer or early autumn.

ic While busy with her play, the child sud-
denly spoke, and said, ' Auntie, Davie is
drowned.' Her father, who was present, and
I, heard her distinctly. I answered, ' Gussie,
what did you say ? ' She repeated the words,
' Davie is drowned.' Her aunt, who was not
familiar with the childish accent, said, ' Gussie,
I do not understand you ' ; when the child
repeated for the third time, ' Auntie, Davie is
drowned.' I chanced to look at the clock, and
saw it was just four. I immediately turned
the conversation, as I did not wish such a
painful thought fastened on the child's
mind.

" I cannot recall that any allusion had been
made to the boys that day; neither was I
aware that my daughter even knew the mean-
ing of the word drowned. She simply uttered
the words without apparent knowledge of their
import.

" That evening a telegram came from my
brother, saying, ' My little boys, Darius and
Davie, were drowned at four o'clock to-day
while skating on Kenks Lake.'

" E. M. OGDEN."

The foregoing statement is corroborated
by Mr. Curtis, brother-in-law to Mrs. Ogden.
This case is interesting because a very young
child is not likely to have nervous apprehen-
sions or forebodings of disaster concerning
young playmates, of whose whereabouts and

E 2

132 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

occupation at the time she had not the
remotest notion. (Journal S.P.R., vol. i.,
p. 435.)

If we could discover some underlying reason
for these sporadic occurrences few would doubt
the evidence. But nearly all the cases seem
so meaningless and often trivial that we are
disposed to reject the evidence on that account.
This, however, is an unscientific and irrational
attitude, and if adopted would be fatal to all
scientific inquiry : how trivial and meaningless
once seemed the attraction of light bodies to
rubbed amber, and yet the science and very
name of electricity arose therefrom. Here,
as elsewhere, we must exercise patience and
scrupulous care in collecting all available
evidence, and leave the solution to the
future.

CHAPTER X

DREAMS AND CRYSTAL-VISIONS

FROM the earliest times, the mystery
attaching to the world of dream has been a
fruitful subject of speculation. The swift
and dramatic portrayal of scenes, the recovery
of lapsed memories, the occasional glimpses
of things beyond the range of vision during
sleep ; the illusions " hypnagogiques," or vivid
images which sometimes arise between sleep
and waking, all these and other points have
often been discussed. Only a brief account
can first be given of a few cases wherein the
discovery of lost articles has been effected by
a dream. In the consideration of such cases,
we must, however, bear in mind not only the
possibility of the emergence of a lapsed
memory during sleep, but also that the
dreamer may have unconsciously perceived
the lost article and in sleep this fact may
have floated into consciousness. There are,
however, cases where the evidence appears to
go beyond the border line between normal
and supernormal percipience. During hyp-
notic trance — which may be regarded as a
deeper form of sleep — there sometimes also
133

134 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

occurs clairvoyance, or telcesthesia, " percep-
tion at a distance."

The following case, sent by Mrs. Bickford-
Smith immediately after its occurrence, may
be taken as an illustration of the revival of
memory during sleep —

" On reaching Morley's Hotel at 5 o'clock on
Tuesday, 29th January, 1889, I missed a gold
brooch, which I supposed I had left in a fitting-
room at Swan & Edgar's. I sent there at
once, but was very disappointed to hear that
after a diligent search they could not find the
brooch. I was very vexed, and worried about
the brooch, and that night dreamed that I
should find it shut up in a number of the
Queen newspaper that had been on the table,
and in my dream I saw the very page where
it would be, and noticed one of the plates on
that page. Directly after breakfast I went
to Swan & Edgar's and asked to see the
papers, at the same time telling the young
ladies about the dream, and where I had seen
the brooch. The papers had been moved from
that room, but were found, and to the astonish-
ment of the young ladies, I said, ' This is
the one that contains my brooch ; ' and there
at the very page I expected I found it.

" A. M. BICKFORD-SMITH."

We received a substantially similar account
from Mrs. Bickford-Smith's brother-in-law,
Mr. H. A. Smith, the Hon. Treasurer of the
S.P.R., who was a witness of the trouble taken
to find the brooch.

DREAMS AND CRYSTAL- VISIONS 135

A somewhat similar experience was com-
municated to us by Mrs. Crellin, known to Mr.
Gurney —

" When a school-girl I one day foolishly
removed from my French teacher's hand a
ring, which I, in fun, transferred to my own.
On removing it from my finger just before
going to bed, I found that a stone had fallen
out of the ring, and I was much troubled
about it, especially as the ring had been given
to my teacher. We had four class-rooms, and
as I had been moving from one to another
in the course of the evening, I could not hope
to find the lost stone. However, in my
dreams that night I saw the stone lying on a
certain plank on the floor of our ' drilling-
room,' and on awaking I dressed hastily and
went direct to the spot marked in my dream,
and recovered the lost stone. This narrative
has nothing thrilling in it, but its simplicity
and exactness may commend it to your
notice."

Mr. Gurney adds : "In conversation with
me, Mrs. Crellin described the four class-rooms
as good-sized rooms, which it would have taken
a long time to search over. She is positive
that she went quite straight to the spot. She
is an excellent witness."

Another similar dream was contributed by
Mrs. Stuart, of Foley House, Rothesay, N.B.,
a lady well known to Mr. Myers. Here a
friend lost, out of doors, an opal stone from
his ring which he valued as it belonged to his
father. All set to work to search for it on the

136 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

lawn and under the surrounding trees, but
without success. The following night Mrs.
Stuart dreamt she saw the lost opal, glistening
with dew, lying by a leaf beneath a certain
tree which she recognized as at the edge of the
lawn. She was so much impressed with the
vividness of the dream, that in the early
morning she dressed and went out straight to
the tree she had seen in her dream ; there, sure
enough, she found the stone exactly in the
position she had seen it in her dream.

A corresponding case, which has the advan-
tage of having been written down at the time by
the witness and corroborated by the dreamer,
is given by Miss Hunt, of Yeovil, who states
that at 6 p.m., having paid her gardener his
wages wrapped in a piece of paper, she gave
him some letters to post on his way home. An
hour later the gardener returned saying he
had lost the paper containing his wages. He
was told to retrace his steps and make a
careful search ; this he did, but to no avail.
During the night he dreamt that upon crossing
the road his foot struck a mud heap, and there
was the lost paper containing his wages. He
told his wife the dream, and falling asleep again
dreamt the same dream. He got up early,
went to the spot he had seen in his dream,
and there found his wages and all exactly
as he had dreamt. The gardener, who is
described as a most intelligent, truthful man,
corroborates the facts. Here, again, is another
useful dream which, like the last, appears to
lie on the border line between lapsed memory

DREAMS AND CRYSTAL- VISIONS 137

and some supernormal percipience during
sleep.

From Mr. Herbert J. Lewis, 19, Park Place,
Cardiff—

"In September 1880, I lost the landing
order of a large steamer containing a cargo
of iron ore, which had arrived in the port of
Cardiff. She had to commence discharging
at six o'clock the next morning. I received
the landing order at four o'clock in the after-
noon, and when I arrived at the office at six
I found that I had lost it. During all the
evening I was doing my utmost to find the
officials at the Custom House to get a permit,
as the loss was of the greatest importance,
preventing the ship from discharging. I
came home in a great degree of trouble about
the matter, as I feared that I should lose my
situation in consequence.

" That night I dreamed that I saw the lost
landing order lying in a crack in the wall
under a desk in the Long Room of the Custom
House. At five the next morning I went
down to the Custom House and got the
keeper to get up and open it. I went to the
spot of which I had dreamed, and found
the paper in the very place. The ship was not
ready to discharge at her proper time, and I
went on board at seven and delivered the
landing order, saving her from all delay.
" HERBERT J. LEWIS."

The truth of the foregoing is certified by

138 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

two witnesses, and further inquiry on the spot
also corroborated Mr. Lewis' statement.

It is, of course, possible that in all these
cases the lost object might originally have
come within the range of vision of the owner
but only subconsciously noted; in sleep the
faint impression may have emerged in a dream
sufficiently vivid to be remembered upon
awaking. There are, however, other cases
wherein this explanation does not apply,
showing that a higher perceptive faculty
than ordinary vision appears sometimes to
emerge in dream.

Several cases of this kind are cited in detail
by Mr. Myers in Human Personality, vol. i.,
chap, iv., and in the appendix to that chapter.
The narrow limits of our space will only
allow a very brief reference to some of these
cases.

A well-known instance is that of Canon
Warburton, who states that when waiting
up one night for his brother, who had gone
to a dance, he fell asleep and dreamt he saw
his brother " coming out of a drawing-room
with a brightly illuminated landing, catching
his foot in the edge of the top stair and falling
headlong, just saving himself by his elbows
and hands."

Soon after his brother returned and ex-
claimed—

i4 1 have just had a narrow escape of break-
ing my neck. Coming out of the ball-room,
I caught my foot and tumbled full length
down the stairs,"

DREAMS AND CRYSTAL-VISIONS 139

Canon Warburton states he had never seen
the house where the accident occurred, but
the vivid impression he had of the details
of the scene was corroborated by questions
he put to his brother.

A case singularly like the foregoing occurred
with the late Bishop of Iowa (Dr. Lee) and his
son, between whom there was a tender and
sympathetic affection. One night the son —
living in a city three hundred miles distant
from where his father was in Iowa — had a
vivid dream of his father falling down -stairs ;
he jumped to catch the Bishop and awoke
both himself and his wife, to whom he related
his dream : looking at the time he found it to
be 2.15. Unable to sleep further, he rose early
and telegraphed to his father to know if all
was well. The letter in reply informed him
that on the night and almost to the minute
of his dream, the Bishop had fallen down a
flight of stairs and was very seriously injured.
An independent confirmation of the incident
was sent to Dr. Hodgson by the Bishop of
Algowa. (Proc. S.P.&., vol. vii., p. 38.)

Another instance, which had the advantage
of being noted in a diary before the verification
of the dream was known, is given by Mr.
(now Sir Edward) Hamilton, who states :
" On March 20th, 1888, I woke up with the
impression of a very vivid dream. I had
dreamt that my brother, who had long been
in Australia and of whom I had heard nothing
for several months, had come home, and that
something had gone wrong with one of his

140 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

arms — it looked horribly red near the wrist,
his hand being bent back." The dream
vision recurred so persistently on getting up
that, notwithstanding his prejudice against
attaching any importance to dreams, he noted
it down that day in his diary, the only time
he had ever done such a thing; this entry
Mr. Gurney saw. A week later a letter was
received from the brother saying he was on
his way home, and that he was suffering from
a bad arm. On his arrival in London on
March 29th, it turned out that his arm was
suffering from blood-poisoning and that he had
a bad abscess over the wrist-joint. On inquiry
it was found that the letter received by Sir
Edward Hamilton was written by his brother
and posted at Naples on the morning of the
dream in London.

These cases and several others we might
cite may be attributed to telepathy, of the
conditions and range of which we know so
little. In fact, " telepathic clairvoyance " is
considered by some investigators an adequate
explanation of nearly all the phenomena
which appear to indicate supernormal per-
cipience, or " independent clairvoyance."
Certainly it may account for much of the
mystery of the visions seen in " crystal-
gazing," which we must now consider. But
it cannot, in my opinion, account for all the
phenomena described in the next chapter,
nor for the success of the " dowser " described
in Chapter XII. Here, however, we must
take into account the possibility of mis-

DREAMS AND CRYSTAL- VISIONS 141

description and of chance-coincidence, of this
the reader must judge for himself.

CRYSTAL-GAZING

We now come to a class of phenomena
resembling day-dreams; vivid images of
scenes and persons induced by abstracting
the mind from the normal sensory impressions,
through intently gazing upon some lucent
object, such as a glass sphere or polished
crystal. Hallucinations are thus evoked
resembling those in dream pictures or in
hypnotic trance. The percipient, or " server,"
is no doubt in a state of incipient hypnosis;
detached from the surrounding impressions
of the external world and awake to the
impressions arising from his hidden or sub-
liminal self. The crystal is a form of autoscope,
not mechanical, like the pendule or dowsing-
rod, but sensory. As with other autoscopes,
the subconscious contents of the percipient's
mind come into play. Forgotten memories of
events or scenes are sometimes revived; a
latent mental impression is developed into
consciousness; very like the emergence of a
picture on some photographic plate exposed
years ago, then put aside and forgotten, until
accidentally developed to-day. Yet mingled
with these latent memories there sometimes
come scenes of distant events then occurring,
and afterwards verified, which the seer could
not have known through any normal means.
Thus the crystal-gazer, if evidence be worth

142 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

anything, is not infrequently clairvoyant
without being entranced.

" In one point nearly all observers concur.
These visions imply a visualizing power,
greater than the seer can exercise by voluntary
effort. The distinctness, artistic quality and
illumination of these crystal pictures of the
figures, often cause great surprise." This
observation by Mr. Myers is very true. In
fact, the vision is described with the vividness
and sense of reality of an eye-witness of the
actual scene, and resembles similar descriptions
given by the clairvoyant in the hypnotic
trance ; as if the soul in both cases temporarily
transcended its corporeal limitations.

Historically, crystal-gazing is one of the
most ancient and interesting means of in-
ducing hallucinations for the purpose of
seeking information that could not be gained
by the observer through any normal means.
After all there was something to be said for
the oracles in ancient Greece and Rome, where
various forms of crystal-gazing were employed,
known as crystallomancy or hydromancy,
according as the seer gazed at polished
crystals or a mirror, or at a still pool of
water.

In India we find similar methods have been
employed from a remote period, and also in
Arabia, where visions are seen in a mirror by
certain men. Mr. A. Lang tells us that an
Arabian writer of the thirteenth century, one
Ibn Khaldoun, gives practically the same
account of how visions appear in the crystal

DREAMS AND CRYSTAL-VISIONS 143

as is given to-day. Certain men, Khaldoun
says, " look into mirrors, or vessels filled with
water . . . intently, until they perceive what
they announce. The object gazed at dis-
appears, and a sort of curtain, like a fog,
interposes between the observer and the
mirror. Upon this the things they wish to
perceive are depicted and they recount what
they see. When in this state the diviner sees
things not with his ordinary eyesight, but
with his soul. A new mode of perception
has taken place. And yet the perceptions
of the soul are so like those given by the senses
as to deceive the observer, a fact which is
well known."

One can hardly believe this was written seven
centuries ago, so admirably does it describe
the facts and probably the true explanation
of crystal vision, a transcendental, or spiritual
perception rather than the normal sense
perception.

No wonder that in the Middle Ages the
Christian Church regarded the whole thing as
very uncanny and the work of evil spirits, and
those who had the gift of " scrying " — the
specularii they were termed — were looked on
as heretics and treated accordingly. They
survived, however, till the sixteenth century,
when the famous Dr. Dee (1527-1608) gave
a new impetus to crystal-gazing : no doubt
the seer he employed had some clairvoyant
faculty ; the " shew-stone " Dr. Dee used is
still preserved in the British Museum. Aubrey
in his Miscellanies (1696), p. 165, tells us of

144 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

4 Visions in a Beryl or crystal," and remarks
that learned divines connect the " Urim and
Thummim " with crystal-vision. In modern
times Dean Plumptre in Smith's Dictionary of
the Bible takes a not unlike view; the High
Priest by gazing at the bright point in the
Urim passed into a state of abstraction and
saw visions. The antiquity and universality
of some form of crystal-gazing is, as we have
said, unquestionable. We find it in ancient
as well as in modern Egypt, in Assyria, Persia
and India, in Siberia, China and Japan, among
the North American Indians, the Maoris of
New Zealand, and various African tribes. It
was practised by the Incas of Peru, and is still
used among the natives of Australia, Polynesia
and Madagascar. The practice was largely in
use both in England and on the Continent in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and
its exponents were neither fools nor charlatans,
but often learned men of note.

Now let us turn to some of the modern
evidence on behalf of crystal-gazing. Students
will find ample details in the Proceedings of
the S.P.R., vols. v. and viii., or in Mr. A.
Lang's The Making of Religion, from which
we will quote the following. Mr. Lang has a
friend, Miss Angus, who is a remarkable
" scryer." Miss Angus states —

44 A lady one day asked me to 4 scry ' out
a friend of whom she would think. Almost
immediately I exclaimed, 4 Here is an old, old
lady looking at me with a triumphant smile
on her face. She has a prominent nose and

DREAMS AND CRYSTAL- VISIONS 145

nut-cracker chin. Her face is very much
wrinkled, especially at the sides of her eyes,
as if she were always smiling. She is wearing
a little white shawl with a black edge. But . . .
she can't be old, as her hair is quite brown,
although her face looks so very, very old.'
The picture then vanished, and the lady said
that I had accurately described her friend's
mother instead of himself; that it was a
family joke that the mother must dye her
hair, it was so brown, and she was eighty-two
years old. The lady asked me if the vision
were distinct enough for me to recognize a
likeness in the son's photograph ; next day
she laid several photographs before me, and
in a moment, without the slightest hesitation,
I picked him out from his wonderful likeness
to my vision." The facts were verbally
communicated to and corroborated by Mr. A.
Lang within a week of the occurrence.

Another case, also vouched for by Mr. A.
Lang, is interesting as it appears to be a
telepathic transfer of the vision, seen by Miss
Angus, to a friend, Miss Rose —

" At a recent experience of gazing, for the
first time I was able to make another see what
I saw in the crystal ball. Miss Rose called one
afternoon, and begged me to look in the ball
for her. I did so, and immediately exclaimed,
' Oh, here is a bed, with a man in it looking
very ill [I saw he was dead, but refrained from
saying so], and there is a lady dressed in black
sitting beside the bed.' I did not recognize
the man to be any one I knew, so I told her to

146 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

look. In a very short time she called out,
' Oh, I see the bed too. But, oh, take it away,
the man is dead.' She got quite a shock, and
said she would never look in it again. Soon,
however, curiosity prompted her to have one
more look, and the scene at once came back
again, and slowly, from a misty object at the
side of the bed, the lady in black became quite
distinct. Then she described several people
in the room, and said they were carrying
something all draped in black. When she
saw this, she put the ball down and would not
look at it again. She called again on Sunday
(this had been on Friday) with her cousin, and
we teased her about being afraid of the
crystal, so she said she would just look at it
once more. She took the ball, but immedi-
ately laid it down again, saying, ' No, I won't
look, as the bed with the awful man in it is
there again.'

" When they went home, they heard that the
cousin's father-in-law had died that (Sunday)
afternoon, but to show he had never been in
our thoughts, although we all knew he had not
been well, no one suggested him ; his name was
never mentioned in connection with the
vision."

With regard to this incident, Miss Rose,
independently and without consultation with
Miss Angus, wrote, that on looking at the
glass ball after Miss Angus had said she saw
a man ill in bed, —

" I received quite a shock, for there perfectly
clearly in a bright light, I saw stretched out

DREAMS AND CRYSTAL-VISIONS 147

in bed an old man, apparently dead ; for a few
minutes I could not look, and on doing so once
more there appeared a lady in black, etc. At
the time I saw this I was staying with cousins
and it was Friday evening. On Sunday we
heard of the death of the father-in-law of one
of my cousins, but my thoughts were not in
the least about him when looking at the
crystal. I may also say I did not recognize
his features."

This looks like a prophetic vision, or
^recognition of the death two or three days
before it actually occurred; it may be only
a chance coincidence, but if the evidence on
behalf of precognition compels us eventually
to accept it this case may well come under that
designation.

The following case is given by Sir Joseph
Barnby, the well-known musician, and is
quoted by Mr. Myers in his Human Personality t
vol. i., p. 590. Sir J. Barnby writes —

" I was invited by Lord and Lady Radnor
to the wedding of their daughter, Lady Wilma
Bouverie, which took place August 15, 1889.

" I was met at Salisbury by Lord and Lady
Radnor and driven to Longford Castle. In the
course of the drive, Lady Radnor said to me :
' We have a young lady, Miss A. , staying with us
in whom, I think, you will be much interested.
She possesses the faculty of seeing visions,
and is otherwise closely connected with the
spiritual world. Only last night she was
looking in her crystal and described a room
which she saw therein, as a kind of London

148 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

dining-room. [The room described was not
in London, but at L., and Miss A. particularly
remarked that the floor was in large squares
of black and white marble — as it is in the
big hall at L., where family prayers are said. —
H. M. Radnor.] With a little laugh,'she added,
' And the family are evidently at prayers, the
servants are kneeling at the chairs round the
room, and the prayers are being read by a tall
and distinguished-looking gentleman with a
very handsome, long grey beard.' With
another little laugh, she continued : ' A lady
just behind him rises from her knees and
speaks to him. He puts her aside with a wave
of the hand, and continues his reading.' The
young lady here gave a careful description
of the lady who had risen from her knees.

" Lady Radnor then said : 4 From the de-
scription given I cannot help thinking that the
two principal personages described are Lord
and Lady L., but I shall ask Lord L. this
evening as they are coming by a later train,
and I should like you to be present when the
answer is given.'

" The same evening, after dinner, I was
talking to Lord L. when Lady Radnor came
up to him and said : ' I want to ask you a
question. I am afraid you will think it is a
very silly one, but in any case I hope you
will not ask me why I have put the question ? '
To this Lord L. courteously assented. She
then said : ' Were you at home last night ? '
He replied, ' Yes.' She said : ' Were you
having family prayers at such a time last

DREAMS AND CRYSTAL- VISIONS 149

evening ? ' With a slight look of surprise
he replied, 4 Yes, we were.' She then said :
' During the course of the prayers did Lady L.
rise from her knees and speak to you, and did
you put her aside with a wave of the hand ? '
Much astonished, Lord L. answered : ' Yes,
that was so, but may I inquire why you
have asked this question ? ' To which Lady
Radnor answered : ' You promised you
wouldn't ask me that.' '

In commenting on the account Mr. Myers
adds —

" This incident has been independently
recounted to me both by Lady Radnor and
by Miss A. herself. Another small point not
given by Sir J. Barnby is that Miss A. did not
at first understand that family prayers were
going on, but exclaimed : ' Here are a number
of people coming into the room. Why, they're
smelling their chairs.' '

Among others who have the faculty of
crystal -vision may be mentioned Miss Good-
rich-Freer (now Mrs. Hans Spoer) — whose
papers on this subject in the Proceedings of
the S.P.R. (vol. v., etc.) are of great interest.

Space will not allow the quotation of further
illustrations of this strange faculty. What we
find is a mingling of mere fantasy, dream,
memory, telepathy, and clairvoyance; some-
times apparently even prevision and traces
of spirit communion. " A random glimpse,"
as Mr. Myers says, " into inner visions, a
reflection caught at some odd angle from the
universe, as it shines through the perturbing

150 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

medium of that special soul." This, however,
is precisely what we find in other directions
of psychical research. The hidden subliminal
self, sensitive to telepathic impress, emerges
through various " autoscopes " accompanied
with a medley of normal and supernormal
knowledge. In fact, all autoscopes whether
sensory or mechanical (p. 28) seem at times
to become heteroscopes — " other viewers " —
a means whereby some distant intelligence
appears able to give fragmentary glimpses of
its presence. Automatic writing tells us the
same story, and only by patient and long-
continued labour can we unravel the tangled
skein and discover the high transcendent
powers that lie concealed in even the humblest
human personality.

CHAPTER X

SUPEENOEMAL PEECEPTION : SEEING WITHOUT
EYES

THE existence of some kind of supernormal
percipience possessed by certain individuals
has been widely believed in, as in cases of
so-called second sight. The business of
psychical research is to ascertain whether
there is trustworthy evidence on behalf of
that belief. The preceding chapter has
afforded some evidence in its support, and we
must devote the present chapter to a further
examination of this subject.

In the mesmeric trance, a state of " lu-
cidity " or " clairvoyance," as it was called,
was asserted by competent observers in
the middle of the last century. Thus, Dr.
Mayo, F.R.S. (referred to on p. 70), gives
cases he himself had witnessed, which he
thought could only be explained by " seeing
without eyes." The entranced patient often
appeared to locate his organ of transcendental
vision in his hand, or pit of the stomach, or
any part of the body that lent itself to the
illusion. In 1826, the French Medical Com-
mission appointed to inquire into mesmerism
151

152 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

relates several cases in which persons in the
mesmeric trance could describe objects or read
lines in a book, when their eyes were bandaged
or eyelids closed by the fingers. But this may
be explained by thought-transference, as we
are not told whether the operators knew the
thing selected.

Here, for example, is a comparatively recent
case, which appears on the borderland between
telepathy and so-called clairvoyance. It is
attested by one of the most eminent conti-
nental physiologists now living.

Professor C. Richet states (Proc. S.P.R.,
vol. vi.) —

" On Monday, July 2, 1888, after having
passed all the day in my laboratory, I hypno-
tized L6onie at 8 p.m., and while she tried to
make out a diagram concealed in an envelope
I said to her quite suddenly : ' What has
happened to M. Langlois ? ' Leonie knows
M. Langlois from having seen him two or three
times some time ago in my physiological
laboratory, where he acts as my assistant.
'He has burnt himself,' L£onie replied.
4 Good,' I said, * and where has he burnt
himself ? ' 'On the left hand. It is not
fire : it is — I don't know its name. Why
does he not take care when he pours it out ? '
* Of what colour,' I asked, ' is the stuff which
he pours out ? ' ' It is not red, it is brown ;
he has hurt himself very much — the skin
puffed up directly.'

" Now, this description is admirably exact.
At 4 p.m. that day M. Langlois had wished to

SUPERNORMAL PERCEPTION 153

pour some bromine into a bottle. He had
done this clumsily, so that some of the
bromine flowed on to his left hand, which held
the funnel, and at once burnt him severely.
Although he at once put his hand into water,
wherever the bromine had touched it a blister
was formed in a few seconds — a blister which
one could not better describe than by saying,
' the skin puffed up.' I need not say that
Leonie had not left my house nor seen any one
from my laboratory. Of this I am absolutely
certain, and I am certain that I had not
mentioned the incident of the burn to any one.
Moreover, this was the first time for nearly
a year that M. Langlois had handled bromine,
and when Leonie saw him six months before
at the laboratory he was engaged in experi-
ments of quite another kind."

We may regard this either as a case of tele-
pathy or what has been termed "travelling
clairvoyance." The reputed evidence on behalf
of the latter is indeed more widespread and
more ancient than for the former. As Mr. A.
Lang says, " Evidence proves that precisely
similar beliefs as to man's occasional power
of c opening the gates of distance ' have been
entertained in a great variety of lands and
ages, and by races in every condition of cul-
ture." Mr. Lang gives instances of this
among the Zulus, the Lapps, the Red Indians,
the Peruvians, as well as cases, ancient and
modern, of Scotch " second sight." Aubrey
in his Miscellanies (1696), gives " an accurate
account of second-sighted men in Scotland,

154, PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

in two letters from a learned friend of mine in
Scotland." His learned correspondent con-
cludes by remarking, " They generally term
such as have this second sight Taishatrin.
. . . Others call these men Phissichin from
Phis, which is properly fore-sight or fore-
knowledge."

Swedenborg, who was in his day one of the
leading savants of Europe, is alleged to have
possessed this faculty, and occasionally could
" open the gates of distance." The evidence
was investigated at the time by the philosopher
Kant, and is given in an appendix to his
book, entitled Dreams of a Spirit Seer.

The three most famous cases are : —

(1) Swedenborg' s communication to the
Queen of Sweden of some secret information,
which she had asked him for, and believed that
no living human being could have told him.

(2) The widow of the Dutch ambassador
at Stockholm, Madame Harteville, was called
upon by a goldsmith to pay for a silver
service which her deceased husband had
purchased. She believed that her husband
had paid for it, but could not find the receipt ;
so she begged Swedenborg to ask her husband
where it was. Three days later he came to
her house and informed her, in the presence
of some visitors, that he had conversed with
her husband, and had learnt from him that
the debt had been paid, and the receipt was in
a bureau in an up-stairs room in her house.
Madame Harteville replied that the cup-
board had already been searched, but to no

SUPERNORMAL PERCEPTION 155

purpose. Swedenborg answered that the
ghost of her husband had said that after
pulling out the left-hand drawer a board
would appear, and on drawing out this a
secret compartment would be disclosed, con-
taining his private Dutch correspondence and
the receipt. The whole company went up-
stairs, and the papers, with the receipt, were
found, as described, in the secret compart-
ment, of which no one had known before.

(3) In September 1759, at four o'clock on
a Saturday afternoon, Swedenborg arrived at
Gottenburg from England, and was invited
by a friend to his house. Two hours after he
went out, and then came back and informed
the company that a dangerous fire had just
broken out in Stockholm (which is about fifty
German miles from Gottenburg), and that it
was spreading fast ; he was restless and went
out often. He said that the house of one of
his friends, whom he named, was already in
ashes, and that his own was in danger. At
eight o'clock, after he had been out again,
he declared with joy that the fire was ex-
tinguished at the third door from his house.
This news occasioned great commotion
throughout the whole city, and was announced
to the Governor the same evening.

On Sunday morning, Swedenborg was
summoned to the Governor, who questioned
him about the disaster. He described the
fire precisely, how it had begun and in what
manner it had ceased, and how long it had
continued. On Monday evening a messenger

156 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

arrived at Gottenburg, who had been dis-
patched by the Board of Trade during the
time of the fire. In the letters brought by
him, the fire was described precisely as stated
by Swedenborg, and next morning the news
was further confirmed by information brought
to the Governor by the Royal Courier. As
Swedenborg had said, the fire had been
extinguished at eight o'clock.

Sixty or seventy years ago, when the public
were profoundly interested in the novel and
wonderful accounts of mesmeric phenomena,
many cases of alleged clairvoyance were noted
by Dr. Elliotson and others who were con-
stantly engaged in hypnotic treatment of
patients. One of the most remarkable cases
was that of a girl named Ellen Dawson, who
had been subject to epileptic fits as a child,
for which she had been treated mesmerically
and with great success by a West-end surgeon,
Mr. W. Hands. The latter, observing that
Ellen, when in the trance, could apparently
see objects without the use of her eyes, tried
to cultivate her clairvoyant faculty, and, it is
asserted, she developed a power of accurately
describing distant places and persons she had
never seen with her normal vision. If tele-
pathy be accepted as a vera causa no doubt it
affords a partial explanation, but the frequent
relation of facts afterwards confirmed, though
at the time unknown to the hypnotizer and
others present, as well as the vividness and
accuracy of description given by the subject,
unduly strain any telepathic hypothesis.

SUPERNORMAL PERCEPTION 157

Two most remarkable communications
about Ellen Dawson's clairvoyance are to be
found in the Zoist for 1845. The first is from
Mr. Hands, who states that in order to
satisfy himself that Ellen did not use her
normal vision, he filled the covers of two pill-
boxes with cotton-wool and tied one over
each of Ellen's eyes with a broad strip of
ribbon, taking care that the edges of the
boxes rested on the skin : —

" Still she read and distinguished as before.
I now placed her " (Mr. Hands continues) " in
a room from which I had shut out every ray
of light and then presented her with some
plates in Cuvier's Animal Kingdom; she
described the birds and* beasts and told
accurately the colour of each, as I proved by

foing into the light to test her statements,
he also distinguished the shades and hues of
silks."

This incident, assuming the observations
are correct, presents an interesting psycho-
logical puzzle, as the colours of objects are
due to their action on light rays, by selective
absorption or otherwise; in the absence of
light, colour, as our eyes know it, has no
existence. If Mr. Hands knew what the
particular colours and coloured plates were,
a telepathic explanation removes the diffi-
culty, but apparently he did not, and tele-
pathy does not explain other incidents. Thus
Mr. Hands asked her to visit his birthplace,
Berkeley (where Mrs. Hands was staying),
140 miles from London. She accurately

158 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

described the church at Berkeley and various
monuments therein, and also the house where
Mrs. Hands was staying ; asked what the
latter was doing, Ellen said she was playing a
game of cards, and described the other persons
present. Then she exclaimed, " Mrs. H.
has won the game and is getting up from her
chair." All these details turned out to be
perfectly correct, for Mr. Hands adds : "At
this time (9 p.m.), as I subsequently learnt,
Mrs. H. did rise from her chair, saying to
her adversary, ' I have beaten you com-
pletely.' "

On another occasion, a lady having lost
her brooch, asked Mr. Barth if Ellen, whom
she had not seen before, could trace it when
entranced. Accordingly she was put to sleep,
whereupon

" Ellen Dawson described a former servant
of Mrs. M.'s, who she said had stolen the
brooch, and said that she had kept the case
with some diamonds in it in her trunk, and
sold the brooch for a very small sum ; that it
was then in a place like a cellar, with ' lots of
other property,' silver spoons, etc., and that
the servant had moved from the place she
had lived at when she first left Mrs. M.
This latter point was found to be correct, and
Mrs. M. (who had suspected another of her
servants), on the advice of the clairvoyant,
sent for the girl to come to her house and
taxed her with the theft. Finally, the girl
confessed that she had stolen the brooch and
pawned it, keeping the case and two diamond

SUPERNORMAL PERCEPTION 159

chains which were worn with the brooch. All
the property was finally recovered."

Many other well -attested cases by good
observers were published both in England
and the Continent some sixty years ago. Nor
is the evidence for clairvoyance confined to
the older mesmerists. One of the members
of the S.P.R., Mr. Dobbie, living in Australia,
has in recent years had several clairvoyants
among subjects whom he had hypnotized. A
case like the preceding one is given by him in
the Proceedings of the S.P.R. Mr. Adamson,
a leading citizen in Adelaide, communicates
the facts, which are briefly as follows. His
daughter had lost a trinket off her watch-
chain, and both went to Mr. Dobbie to see
if his clairvoyant could trace it. When en-
tranced, the clairvoyant described what the
trinket was, where it was lost, the person who
found it, and the place where he had put it,
and gave so exact a description of the house
that it was readily found. Not only was the
trinket thus recovered, but on questioning the
finder, Mr. Adamson learnt that it was picked
up on the road exactly as the clairvoyant had
described.

In another case in which the clairvoyant
was tested, she accurately described what a
gentleman, then fifty miles away, was doing,
the furniture in the room where he was, and
a book he was holding. On returning home
a week later, the gentleman was astonished
to hear what the clairvoyant had said, and
stated that she was perfectly correct in every

160 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

particular, even to the book which he had
purchased on his journey from home. (Proc.
S.P.R., vol. vii., p. 68 et seq.)

Some critics have objected that the evidence
on behalf of clairvoyance is never written down
before the facts are confirmed ; this, however,
has been done, as in the following case sent
to us by an American naturalist, Dr. Elliot
Coues, of Washington. It seems that a friend
of Dr. Coues, Mrs. Conner, was going up
the steps of her residence in Washington one
afternoon, carrying some papers, when she
stumbled and fell. About the same moment
a friend of hers, Mrs. B., had a singular
vision of the whole incident whilst she was
in her own house a mile and a half away.
The vision was so vivid that Mrs. B. wrote
to Mrs. Conner the same evening about it,
telling her, in a letter seen by Dr. Coues, that
when sewing in her room at two o'clock that
afternoon "what should I see but your
own dear self . . . falling up the front steps
in the yard. You had on your black skirt and
velvet waistband, your little straw bonnet, and,
in your hand, some papers. When you fell
your hat went in one direction and the papers
in another. It was all so plain to me that I
had ten notions to one to dress and come over
and see if it were true. Is there any possible
truth in it ? I can distinctly call to mind
the house in which you live, but can't for
the life of me tell whether there are any
steps."

On investigation it appears that not only

SUPERNORMAL PERCEPTION 161

was the description of the dress, bonnet,
etc., perfectly correct, but also the entrance
to the house and the steps up to it. Mrs.
Conner had only moved to this house a

few days before and Mrs. B had never

seen it. (Journal S.P.R., vol. iv., p. 89.)

Perhaps the most extraordinary and appar-
ently unimpeachable evidence of clairvoyance
is given in a little book kindly sent to me by
Dr. Heysinger, of Philadelphia, who suggests
the term telegnosis, or knowing at a distance,
instead of clairvoyance. The book bears the
strange title of " X -f- Y = Z, or the Sleeping
Preacher of North Alabama." It was published
in 1876, and includes statements by numerous
witnesses of the supernormal knowledge
possessed by the sleeping preacher, as he was
called, a respected Presbyterian minister, the
Rev. C. B. Sanders. Additional corroboration
of the facts was obtained by Professor W.
James and Dr. Hodgson. The late U.S. Chief
Justice Brickell, whose home was near Mr.
Sanders' residence, states that the witnesses
named in the book are of the highest char-
acter, and some of considerable learning. In
this case any explanation by fraud, collusion,
or fabrication cannot be suggested. It seems
from the evidence of the medical man, Dr.
Thach, who attended Mr. Sanders, that his
patient periodically went into trances, often
accompanied with violent paroxysms and
extreme sensitiveness to touch. It was during
these trances that Mr. Sanders became con-
scious of events taking place at a distant spot

162 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

to which his attention was directed. On
returning to his normal state, he was totally
ignorant of anything that had occurred during
the trance or " sleep," — which lasted from a
few minutes to days. During the sleep Mr.
Sanders ignored his own name, and signed
himself X + Y = Z.

The Rev. G. W. Mitchell, who gives a careful
record of the evidence relating to Mr. Sanders'
clairvoyance, quotes sixty-nine witnesses who
testify to the fact that during his sleep he
described incidents afterwards verified, which
could not possibly have been known to him
through normal means. Among these wit-
nesses are ten clergymen and six physicians,
the evidence being corroborated by others
present. We have only space to quote one
or two incidents. Here, for example, is an
amusing case. Mr. Sanders having been
confined to his bed from a dislocated thigh, a
neighbouring minister, the Rev. De Witt, one
day took him over some delicacy and had
to cross a fence before getting to the house.
Having both hands full and the fence being
very unstable, with its top rail loose, he
nearly tumbled off in crossing it. On arriving
at Mr. Sanders' house, more than half a mile
away, he found Mr. Sanders in his so-called
" sleep," but animated and laughing, saying
he was greatly amused at the predicament in
which De Witt had been placed in crossing the
fence with his hands full. As it was impossible
to see the fence from the house and no one
else present had witnessed the occurrence,

SUPERNORMAL PERCEPTION 163

Mr. De Witt was greatly astonished. A
friend who was present at the time, Mr. J. W.
Pruitt, writes as follows concerning this
incident —

" I certify that one day about the middle
of the month of February 1866, while Brother
Sanders was confined to his bed from a dislo-
cated thigh, I was at his house, and he was
lying in his bed and in one of his so-called
4 sleeps.' He attracted my attention by a
hearty laugh. I asked him the cause of his
amusement. He replied, ' I was laughing at
De Witt.' I asked what was De Witt doing.
He said, 4 He was having a hard scuffle to keep
from falling off the fence, for the top rail was
turning with him and he was trying to keep
from falling over it.' Nothing more was said
on the subject until De Witt arrived, which
was in ten or fifteen minutes.

" The fence where the difficulty occurred was
from three-fourths to a mile distant, on the
other side of a thick grove of timber and under-
bush, and of an intervening hill.

" And I further certify that no communica-
tion from any person or source was received
in reference to De Witt until he arrived and
confirmed what Mr. Sanders said.

" J. W. PRUIT."

Several cases, corroborated by witnesses,
are also recorded of Mr. Sanders' knowledge
that a distant person was just dying or dead,
of accidents occurring to friends at some

F 2

164 PYSCHICAL RESEARCH

distance, of a fire taking place in a distant
town, with a description of a shop in which
it broke out and the extent of its ravages,
much resembling the far vision of Swedenborg
already quoted. Various cases are also given
of Mr. Sanders in his sleep finding lost articles,
coins, a watch-chain, and specifying correctly
where they would be found. Here is a striking
instance, attested by three witnesses; Mr.
Bentley writes —

" Some time during the summer [1867] a
bunch of keys, among which was my wheat-
garner key, was lost. After a lapse of about
one week, I requested Mr. William White, who
was employed in the store and boarded at
the Rev. C. B. Sanders' in the village, on
going to his dinner, to ask him to tell me where
my keys were. On his return Mr. White
said he made the request; but Mr. Sanders
paid no attention to what he said, he being
in one of his spells. However, during the
same afternoon, while my younger sister, in
company with other persons, was at his
house, he told her that my keys were under
the steps at the west door of my dwelling.
In consequence of this information I returned
home earlier than usual. As soon as I arrived,
I told my wife what I had heard. She ran
immediately and found the keys under the
doorstep, just as Mr. Sanders had said; and
somewhat rusty. They must have been
thrown there a week before by a little child
that played about the house.

SUPERNORMAL PERCEPTION 165

" I add that I know Mr. Sanders had not
been in my house, nor on the place for at least
twelve months before that time.

" A. J. BENTLEY."

The other witnesses present certify that
" the above statements are true, as far as
they relate to us personally; and that we
heard all the particulars as above mentioned,
at the time they occurred." Another case
of the finding of a gold coin from Mr. Sanders'
description of the exact position in which it
was actually discovered is signed by four
witnesses, but the details are too long to quote
here.

Some may be disposed to say, if these facts
are well established why does not Scotland
Yard keep a professional clairvoyant ? Like
all other psychical phenomena such cases as
we have described are rare, and frequently
normal and supernormal knowledge are inter-
mixed. At present, at any rate, they must be
studied for their scientific interest rather than
for their practical utility. It is said that,
years ago a challenge was made to give a
£1,000 bank-note, enclosed in a sealed opaque
box, to any clairvoyant who could read its
number. A similar challenge has been made
as I write these pages, for a conclusive proof
of thought-transference. Others, no doubt,
would give a large multiple of this sum for
a demonstrative evidence of survival after
death. All such pecuniary short-cuts to gain
knowledge are futile. Those who wish to

166 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

arrive at any definite conclusions with regard
to either rare normal or alleged supernormal
phenomena must pay due attention to the
subject and study the evidence of trustworthy
and independent witnesses, as the late Pro-
fessor Tait said concerning the phenomenon of
" globe-lightning."

We may close this chapter by recalling
Goethe's remark to Eckermann : "If any one
advances anything new . . . people resist with
all their might; they act as if they neither
heard nor could comprehend; they speak of
the new view with contempt, as if it were not
worth the trouble of even so much as an
investigation or a regard; and thus a new
truth may wait a long time before it can
make its way."

CHAPTER XII

THE SO-CALLED DIVINING- OR DOWSING-ROD

THE singular success of certain " dowsers "
in locating underground water, hard by wells
that had been sunk in vain, led the Council of
the S.P.R. to ask me to investigate and report
upon this subject some twenty years ago.
Like most people, I was at that time not only
sceptical but inclined to scoff at what seemed
a mere relic of an ancient superstition. Sci-
entific men as a body held that dowsers were
merely clever charlatans and the twisting of
the forked rod a bit of stage-play. It soon
became evident that such views were absurd,
— for one thing many successful dowsers were
amateurs, whose good faith it was impossible
to question. Men of distinction and of high
rank, church dignitaries, and even the president
of a geological society, informed me they were
unable to restrain the motion of the forked
twig and abundant water had been found at
the places so indicated. Nor was their suc-
cess due to the detection of surface signs of
water, for ignorant country-folk and young
children were no less successful as dowsers.
In fact the evidence on behalf of dowsers, in
167

168 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

finding comparatively shallow supplies of
potable water in very unlikely spots, was far
more extensive and remarkable than one had
imagined. Hence the collection and verifica-
tion at first hand of such evidence, the ex-
perimental tests made and the hunting up the
history of the subject became a formidable
task and it was not until after some years that
my first lengthy report was published in the
Proceedings of the S.P.R. for 1895. This was
followed by a second lengthy report in 1900,
and abundant materials have since accumu-
lated for a third report.

Obviously in a brief survey such as this it
will be impossible to do more than relate a
few cases personally investigated, and give an
outline of the conclusions arrived at, referring
those who wish for fuller information to the
monographs mentioned above.

So far as historical researches in the British
Museum and other libraries extend, the first
mention of the forked rod, or virgula divina, as
it was then called, appears to be in an ancient
Latin folio, entitled Sebastian Munster's Cos-
mography published early in 1500. At that
time the rod was only used in the search for
metallic ores, and a quaint picture is given in
this work of a diviner striding over the hilly
country with his uplifted forked rod prospect-
ing for minerals. A little later the first great
treatise on Mining, Agricola's De re metallica,
published in Basle in 1540, gives a more
detailed account of its use for this purpose,
with a couple of admirable plates showing the

DIVINING- OR DOWSING-ROD 169

diviner at work. Agricola calls the rod the
virgula furcata, forked rod, to distinguish it
from the virgula divina, the name attached to
the ancient superstitious practice of rhabdo-
mancy, — divining by bits of sticks, referred
to by Cicero and other classical writers.
Nevertheless, the word divining-rod has per-
sisted, together with some of the superstitious
notions attached to the old virgula.

The miners of Saxony and the Hartz
mountains seem to have been the first to use
the forked rod. Possibly they were led to its
use from the belief, once universal, even among
educated men like Melanchthon, that metallic
ores attracted certain trees which thereupon
drooped over the place where those ores were
to be found ; the drooping no doubt being due
to the soil or other causes. A branch of the
tree was therefore cut and held to see where it
drooped ; later on a branch was held in each
hand and the extremities tied together as
shown in an old Italian plate; finally, for
convenience, a forked branch was cut, the two
ends grasped one in each hand with palms
upwards, the arms of the holder were then
brought to the side of the body, so that the
forked rod was held in somewhat unstable
equilibrium, and the " diviner " set forth on
his quest with, in old time, certain solemnities
and invocations.

In Queen Elizabeth's reign the exploitation
of the Cornish mines was entrusted to a few
notable " Merchant Venturers," who went
over to Saxony to examine the best methods

170 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

of prospecting and mining ore. These mer-
chant venturers probably brought back with
them a " diviner " with his rod, for soon after
we find its use common in Cornwall. Now, the
colloquial German word for the rod was then
schlag-ruthe or striking rod; this, translated
into the Middle English, became the duschan or
striking rod, and finally " deusing or dowsing
rod." Locke, born under the shadow of the
Mendips, where the rod early came into use
in the search for lead ore, is the first writer
using the word " deusing rod," in 1691. To
dowse or " strike " the sail is still a common
expression in Cornwall, so we get the word
" dowser " now used throughout the south-west
of England. The phrase to " strike " the lode
in a mine, or to " strike " oil, may thus have
arisen. The esteem in which the dowsing-rod
was held by old English miners is shown by a
passage in Robert Boyle's famous scientific
essays published in 1663, and still more by
Pryce's standard work on Cornish mines pub-
lished in 1778. Pryce tells us that nearly
all the Cornish mines were located by the
dowsing-rod and to the present day it is
widely used for this purpose.

It was not until near the end of the eight-
eenth century that the rod was used in
England for finding underground water, and
as might be expected it first came into use for
this purpose in the south-west of England.
Two centuries earlier it was employed for this
purpose in the south of Europe. For in a recent
admirable Life of St. Teresa of Spain, the

DIVINING- OR DOWSING-ROD 171

following incident is narrated : Teresa in
1568 was offered the site for a convent to
which there was only one objection, there was
no water supply; happily, a Friar Antonio
came up with a twig in his hand, stopped at a
certain spot and appeared to be making the
sign of the cross ; but Teresa says, " Really I
cannot be sure if it were the sign he made, at
any rate he made some movement with the
twig and then he said, ' Dig just here ' ; they
dug, and lo ! a plentiful fount of water gushed
forth, excellent for ' drinking, copious for
washing, and it never ran dry. ' " As the writer
of this Life remarks : " Teresa, not having
heard of dowsing, has no explanation for this
event," and regarded it as a miracle. This, I
believe, is the first historical reference to
dowsing for water. In a little book published
at Lyons in 1693, entitled La verge de Jacob (it
should be called, as Sir Thomas Browne re-
marks, " the Mosaical rod," not Jacob's rod),
pictures are given showing different kinds of
rod, or baguette, different ways of holding it,
and the success attending those who can
use it in discovering springs. Other and more
learned writers of that date, such as the Abbe
de Vallemont (1695) and Father le Brun
(1702), deal with the mystery of the baguette
and afford evidence of its widespread use in
water-finding throughout arid districts in the
south of France.

As stated in a previous chapter, the use
of the baguette in the seventeenth century,
especially in the south of France, spread to many

172 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

other hidden things, such as the finding of
buried treasure and even the tracking of
criminals ! Jacques Aymar, a poor mason
of Dauphiny, obtained great reputation as a
sour tier in 1692, and when a terrible murder
was committed in a wine-shop in Lyons he
was sent for to track the criminals with his
baguette, as no trace of them could be found.
The whole details of this famous case have
been preserved in contemporary documents.
Arriving at the scene of the murder with his
rod, Aymar started off in pursuit of the
murderers like a bloodhound on the scent :
he tracked them to the river Rhone, followed
them from place to place, discovered there
were three engaged in the crime, traced two
of them till they crossed the frontier, finally
ran down the other one, a hunchback, who
was arrested, confessed the crime, and was
executed : the last person in Europe who
suffered that terrible penalty of being " broken
at the wheel." Strangely enough the deposi-
tions made at the trial showed that Aymar
was correct in every detail, witnesses testi-
fying to the flight and halting-places of the
culprits in the very places Aymar had indi-
cated. The keen interest this case excited,
and the critical examination it underwent, is
shown by the large amount of literature it
called forth for some years afterwards, and
Aymar became notorious throughout Europe.
He was, however, subsequently somewhat
discredited owing to his failure in some tests
devised by the Prince de Conde*.

DIVINING- OR DOWSING-ROD 173

The often fallacious and mischievous results
which followed the indiscriminate use of the
baguette for all sorts of purposes rightly led
to its use being prohibited in the moral world
early in the eighteenth century. Its wide-
spread use in finding underground water
nevertheless continued throughout France
and many other parts of Europe. One of the
physicians of Louis XVI, Dr. Thouvenel,
published able and lengthy reports in 1781
and 1784 of the results of his critical tests of
a sourcier named Bleton, a charity boy, who
was perhaps the most remarkable dowser
known in history. According to contem-
porary evidence, Bleton by his discovery of
numerous underground springs in an arid
province in France " converted a desert into
a fruitful country." Nor must we suppose,
as we are apt to do, that the critical and
sceptical-spirit belongs exclusively to ourselves
or to our own age; such startling results as
were achieved by Bleton led to the most
searching inquiry, the severest tests were
applied, and many of the most sceptical were
convinced.

Later on, in our own country, De Quincey tells
us of the wonderful success of the " jowsers,"
as he calls them, in Somerset, where in certain
parts underground water is very hard to
locate, and where scientific skill is frequently
at fault. At the present day landowners and
well-sinkers in the south-west of England,
when in difficulty where to sink a well, almost
invariably employ a dowser; usually an un-

174 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

educated man who has discovered that he
possesses this peculiar " gift," as he terms it.
The use of the dowsing-rod has also spread to
America, where it is employed not only in the
search for underground ores and water, but
also for finding oil-springs. Here, however,
as mentioned on p. 22, a sort of plumb-bob,
suspended by a wire or chain, is frequently
employed, as it is also in some parts of France.
A recent number of the Journal of the Ameri-
can S.P.R. gives some striking results of
numerous successful tests made with a dowser
using this ancient magic pendulum.

During the latter half of the nineteenth
century in England, among other notable
dowsers, John Mullins, of Wiltshire, achieved
extraordinary success in locating underground
water, especially when all other means had
failed. In some districts, of course, under-
ground water can be found anywhere upon
digging down a few feet, e. g. where a bed of
gravel rests upon an impermeable bed of clay ;
but these are places where the dowser is rarely
called in. It is in what may be called " fissure
water," which is the geologist's difficulty,
that the dowser's opportunity occurs. At first >*
it seemed to me probable that the successful
results were merely due to the dowser having
a shrewd eye for the ground, experience having
taught him the surface signs of underground
water. But this hypothesis broke down ; then
it seemed likely his success was due to lucky
hits, which were remembered and the failures
forgotten : this theory also had to be given up.

DIVINING- OR DOWSING-ROD 175

Finally, and with reluctance, I was driven to
the conclusion that certain persons really pos-
sessed an instinct or faculty new to science,
of which the muscular spasm, that causes the
twisting of the forked rod, is the outward and
visible sign. It is impossible to give here even
an outline of the evidence on which this con-
clusion rests ; a brief summary of a few remark-
able cases, which I have personally investi-
gated, is all that can be attempted.

The late Sir Henry Harben had built a
mansion, water towers, etc., on his fine estate
near Horsham, in Sussex. He then had a
well, 90 feet deep, sunk, hoping to get water,
but the well was dry. Acting upon expert
advice, he next had a well, 55 feet deep, sunk
in another place, with no result. Then he was
advised to sink a third well at another spot;
this was done, and a huge well, 100 feet deep,
was sunk in the Horsham clay ; alas ! little or
no water was found. Scientific experts then
advised him to run adits in different directions
at the bottom of this big well. This he did at
the cost of £1,000, but the result was a com-
plete failure. Finally in despair, he reluctantly
sent for the dowser John Mullins. Sir Henry
met him at the station, drove him to his
place, and gave him no information. Mullins
perambulated the estate holding his forked
twig, and, after searching for some time in
vain, at last the dowsing-rod turned violently,
and he asserted an abundant supply of water
would be obtained at that spot at a depth of
under 20 feet; another spot was found close

176 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

by, and both were on a small elevation. Two
wells were dug at these spots, through a sand-
stone rock, and an immense perennial
supply of excellent water was found at about
15 feet deep. It is true, shallow wells are
generally objectionable, but this happens to
be an excellent potable water, as it comes
from the hill -top. This sandstone cap over
the Horsham clay was unsuspected, being
covered with surface soil and grass. The
explanation of the dowser's success might
possibly have been attributed to a sharp eye
for the ground, had it not been for the fact
that the dowser was no geologist, was a stran-
ger to the locality, and the spot had been
passed over by the scientific experts previ-
ously engaged.

" The next case is still more remarkable, and
here J. Mullins was also concerned. In 1887
the proprietors of an extensive bacon factory
at Waterford, Messrs. Richardson & Co.,
needed a larger water supply than they pos-
sessed; accordingly, they had a well 62 feet
deep sunk at the most promising spot, but
no water was found. They then obtained
professional advice, and, based on geological
considerations, determined to have a boring
made at another spot. This was carried out
and a bore-hole 292 feet deep was sunk, and,
as only a trifling quantity of water was ob-
tained, the bore-hole was widened; but it
was no use, the yield of water was so insignifi-
cant that the bore-hole was abandoned. The
next year, acting upon other skilled advice,

DIVINING- OR DOWSING-ROD 177

they had a bore-hole, 7 inches diameter, sunk
at the bottom of the 62-feet well. The work
was undertaken by the Diamond-drill Rock-
boring Company. With difficulty, 612 feet
were bored through a very hard silurian rock,
but no water was obtained. The boring was,
however, continued 338 feet deeper, or a total
of 950 feet, which — added to the depth of the
well — made 1,012 feet in all from the surface.
The result was a complete failure, and this bore-
hole, which cost nearly £1,000, was abandoned.
Then, acting upon the best geological advice,
another spot was selected, and a bore-hole 52
feet deep was made. The strata encountered
were, however, identically the same, and
geologists advised the firm to go no farther,
as the quest was hopeless. They were con-
sidering the advisability of moving their
factory elsewhere when they were urged to
try John Mullins, the English dowser. Mullins
was sent for from Wiltshire. He came over,
was told nothing of what had been done, he
walked over the premises, about 700 by
300 feet in area, asked no questions, but
traversed the ground silently, holding his
dowsing-rod. Suddenly, at one spot, only a
few yards from the deep bore-hole, the forked
twig twisted so violently that it broke in his
hands. Here Mullins declared there was an
abundant supply of water, which he estimated
would be found at 80 or 90 feet below the
surface. At two or three other places hard
by the rod also twisted as he walked in
and out of the sheds. Boring was begun at

178 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

the spot indicated by Mullins, where the rod
broke. It was considered a waste of money,
and a local geologist was asked to report pro-
gress to an officer of the Irish Geological
Survey. His letters, written at the time, I
have been allowed to copy, and the result
reads like a fairy tale. At a depth of rather
less than 90 feet water suddenly rushed up
the bore-hole, pumping was begun, and so
great was the yield that the bore-hole was
enlarged to a well, and from that time (1889)
to the present an unfailing supply of excellent
water, of from 3,000 to 5,000 gallons an hour,
has been obtained from the dowser's well.
Mr. Kilroe, of H.M. Geological Survey, has
kindly investigated the whole matter for me,
and his report shows that Mullins must have
struck a line of fault or narrow fissure in the
hard " ordovician rock," as the water-bearing
points he fixed on all lie in a straight line.
Through this fissure the water, no doubt,
streamed from the adjacent high ground, but
there were no surface indications of this
fissure, as the rock was covered by 40 feet of
boulder clay.

Here, again, are the results of some severe
tests to which an amateur dowser, Mr. J. H.
Jones, of Waterford, was submitted by an
experienced lawyer, my friend Sir John
Franks, C.B., the former Secretary to the
Irish Land Commission. Sir John wanted a
water supply on some property of his in West
Kilkenny, and, being very sceptical as to
dowsing, tested Mr. Jones as follows. It

DIVINING- OR DOWSING-ROD 179

seems there are some old long-disused wells on
the property with nothing on the surface to
show where they were. Sir John writes to
me that Mr. Jones, who was a stranger to him
and to the locality, " had never been over the
ground before and knew nothing of these
wells, which were only apparent when quite
close, with no paths leading to them ; he (Mr.
Jones) quartered the ground backwards and
forwards like a dog looking for game . . .
found the direction of flow of the water, fol-
lowed it steadily until he hit off the place
where the concealed wells are. The last test
was quite wonderful, as I brought him quite
half a mile away to the top of the watershed,
to a place from which he could not have had
an idea where the well opened, in a spot quite
out of sight until one got within two yards of
it, but he hit it off with absolute accuracy.
In the place where he indicated a site to sink
for a new well, there were no surface indica-
tions at all, and it was quite half a mile away
from any of the old wells. We had to cut
and blast principally through solid rock, 38 feet
down before we hit the spring. There are
now 20 feet of water in this well."

I was anxious to put the dowser to the test
of comparing his indications with those of
another independent dowser, and ascertain-
ing whether both would indicate the same
spots where water would be found, and also
where it would not be found. A site was
therefore selected on a mountain slope in Co.
Wicklow which no dowser had ever visited,

180 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

and where the most shrewd observer could
not possibly predict beforehand the presence
or absence of underground water at any
particular spot. The rock is sandstone and
quartzite, and water springs only occur in a
few places. I sent for a good English dowser,
Mr. W. Stone, who came over specially from
Lincolnshire, where he lived. The field was
covered with grass, and the bed-rock was
believed to be only a few feet below the sur-
face. The dowser marched to and fro, and
fixed on two spots where he said plenty of
water would be found within 20 feet from
the surface, and another adjacent spot where
he said no water would be found. Then I
took him to another field on the other side of
the mountain, here he declared no water
would be found anywhere, the forked twig
refusing to move in his hands.

A second dowser, a successful amateur, was
then tried a few weeks later ; he knew nothing
of the previous dowser's visit. His indica-
tions exactly coincided with those of the first
dowser. Boring apparatus was obtained and
a set of bore-holes were made, first in one
field, then in the other. The bed-rock was
deeper than we thought, and after boring
through 16 feet of hard, dry boulder clay, at
the spot where the dowser said water would
be found, a splendid spring of water was en-
countered. At the spot, a few yards distant,
where the dowser said there was no water,
we bored down to the solid rock, and spent a
week boring into the rock, but no water was

DIVINING- OR DOWSING-ROD 181

found. At the third place where he pre-
dicted water we found on boring a splendid
supply at 18 feet below the surface. The
first and third borings showed that a bed of
sand and gravel, through which the under-
ground water streamed, lay above the bed-
rock and below the surface boulder clay. But
how had the dowser hit upon this permeable
water-line, when there was nothing whatever
to indicate its presence ? In the other field, on
the other side of the mountain, which seemed
much more likely to be water-bearing, but
where both the dowsers said no water would
be found, we bored in several places down
to the solid rock, spending nearly a month
making bore-holes, but not a drop of water
was found.

It was in consequence of the unexpected
and plentiful supply of water found in the
first mountain field, that I secured the land
for the purpose of a country cottage, which
was subsequently built, and a well sunk in
place of the bore-hole ; even in times of great
drought — when most springs have run dry —
this well at Carrigoona has never failed.

These cases are only illustrations (though
striking ones) of upwards of a hundred other
cases I have investigated of the dowser's
success when other means had failed. No
doubt there are rogues who pretend to be
dowsers, and who hopelessly fail when under-
ground water is difficult to locate; and, no
doubt also, when a large water supply to a
town is needed, it would be far better to seek

182 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

skilled geological advice than trust to even
the best dowser.

The twisting of the forked twig occurs with
many persons who are not good dowsers ; with
such any subconscious suggestion will start
its motion. A dowser requires to be tested
before he can be relied upon, and it is
always better before sinking a well to have
the independent evidence of more than
one water-finder : for the dowser is by no
means infallible, though he generally thinks
he is.

What is the explanation of this peculiar
gift, or instinct, if such it be, that is possessed
by a good dowser ? The dowser himself
usually thinks it is electricity, but that is
only a convenient, and to the ignorant a
meaningless, word, used to account for any
mysterious occurrence. If the dowser knows
that he himself or his forked twig is insulated
from the ground, it is true the rod will not
work, but if he doesn't know it, although good
insulation has secretly been effected, the rod
works as well as ever, and vice versa. Pre-
cisely the same effect of suggestion occurs, if
the dowser be tried with' radio-active sub-
stances and is disposed to believe that is the
cause : or if he believes the rod moves upward
for approaching underground water and down-
ward on receding from it ; or if it turns, for
minerals when he holds a piece of ore in his
hand, or for water if he holds a wet rag, or
just the reverse of this, as is actually the case
in some parts. All these are well-known

DIVINING- OR DOWSING-ROD 183

effects of suggestion, and the dowser is a very
suggestible subject.

The sudden twisting of the twig, even the
violent breaking of one branch of it, upon
attempting to restrain its gyration, is an in-
voluntary act, and probably only a remarkable
instance of unconscious muscular action, as
explained in Chapter II. It is true that
cultured men of scientific tastes who are
dowsers, like Dean Ovenden, utterly deny
this explanation of its sudden motion and
believe an unknown force of some kind is
the true cause ; but if so, it must be an ex-
ternal force of which we have not the remotest
conception. The chief question, however, is
the nature of the faculty which leads a good
dowser to discover the hidden spring or
metallic ore when other means have failed.

The explanation, I believe, is not physical,
but psychical. All the evidence points to the
fact that the good dowser subconsciously
possesses the faculty of clairvoyance, a
supersensuous perceptive power such as we
have described in a previous chapter. This
gives rise to an instinctive, but not conscious,
detection of the hidden object for which he
is in search. This obscure and hitherto unre-
cognized human faculty reveals itself by
creating an automatic or involuntary muscular
spasm that twists the forked rod. Some-
times it produces a curious malaise or
transient discomfort, which furnishes some
dowsers with a sufficient indication to enable
them to dispense with the use of a forked

184 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

twig, or loop of wire, used by some. This
hypothesis I have put to the test of experi-
ment with a good amateur dowser and found
he really possessed this kind of second sight.
If so dowsers ought to be able to find other
hidden things, besides water and minerals,
and this is the case. Long ago the divining-
rod was used in the search for buried treasure
and hidden coins, and although we may smile
at such credulity, nevertheless there is in
recent times good evidence of the dowser
John Mullins repeatedly finding carefully
hidden coins. With two amateur dowsers,
Mr. J. F. Young and Miss Miles, I have made
numerous experiments to ascertain their
powers in this respect. The experiments
were in all cases arranged so as to exclude
the possibility of their gaining any knowledge,
from unconscious indications given by myself,
of the position of the coin, hidden in their
absence. To get rid of possible telepathy
was more difficult; the person who alone
knew where the coin was hidden was excluded
from the room and unaware when the trial
was begun; this made no difference in the
results, which, though not invariably success-
ful, were far beyond any success that could be
achieved by mere chance.

There is, therefore, very strong presumptive
evidence that a good dowser is one who
possesses a supernormal perceptive power,
seeing as it were without eyes. Like other
supernormal faculties it resides in the sub-
liminal self and usually reveals itself through

DIVINING- OR DOWSING-ROD 185

some involuntary muscular action. Possibly
a like faculty of discernment beyond the
power of vision may exist in certain animals
and birds, and afford an explanation of the
mystery of many otherwise inexplicable cases
of homing and migratory instincts.

If the case of Jacques Aymar, narrated on
a previous page, can be relied on, it might
be accounted for by an extension of the
clairvoyant faculty to the supernormal de-
tection of traces of scent or footprints left by
the criminals. Records exist of certain old
Indian tribes in Mexico, among whom were
certain persons possessing a like faculty, and
from the Indian word for these men came the
name Zahoris (meaning gifted with second
sight or clairvoyant) applied to wandering
individuals in Spain in the sixteenth century,
of whom are related (as early as 1515) wonder-
ful stories of their strange occult gifts of
vision, etc.

Whatever truth there may be in these old
stories, we are less inclined to ridicule them as
fables after the conclusions to which we have
been led as regards dowsing. These conclu-
sions are: (1) that those who really possess
this curious faculty are rare, and many pre-
tenders exist; the good dowser is a case of
nascitur non fit; (2) the involuntary motion
of the forked twig which occurs with certain
persons, is due to a muscular spasm that may
be excited in different ways; (3) the explan-
ation of the success of good dowsers, after
prolonged and crucial tests, is — like that of

186 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

any other obscure human faculty or instinct
— a matter for further physiological and
psychological research, though provisionally
we may entertain the working hypothesis
suggested, viz. unconscious clairvoyance, an
aspect of what Mr. Myers terms telcesthesia,
"perception at a distance."

CHAPTER XIII

HAUNTINGS AND POLTERGEISTS

AMONG the most popular of traditional
"ghost-stories" are those of haunted houses
and places. Cases of reputed hauntings are
to be found in the literature of all countries,
both ancient and modern, the types remaining
alike throughout.

This inveterate persistency of species in
l ghost-stories appears rather curiously in a
'letter of the younger Pliny to his friend Sura,
(Containing three stories of three still well-
marked types : a premonitory vision, a haunted
house, and a " poltergeist." Of these the
first, about Curtius Rufus, an eminent public
man, is also told, more briefly, by Pliny's
friend Tacitus in the eleventh book of his
Annals. The second has the most orthodox
features of conventional fiction. A commo-
dious residence in Athens had long stood
empty, its tenants routed by the nightly
visits of a spectral old man of extremely
emaciated and squalid appearance, with long
beard and dishevelled hair, rattling the chains
on his feet and hands, who so alarmed the
beholders that some of them died. The
187

188 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

philosopher Athenodorus, seeing the house
for sale on extraordinarily low terms, resolved
to investigate the spectre and took up his
abode there — a pioneer among psychical
researchers. As he sat alone at midnight,
the inevitable ghost appeared, and with
beckoning hand and clanking chains led him
to a place in the area of the house, where it
vanished. Marking the place, Athenodorus
next day induced the magistrates to order
excavations, which disclosed a fettered
skeleton. Whereupon the bones being
publicly interred, with propitiatory rites, the
house was haunted no more ! In conclusion,
Pliny begs his friend to consider the subject
carefully; "and though," he adds, "you
should as usual balance between two opinions,
yet I hope that you will lean more to one side
than the other, lest you should dismiss me in
the same suspense and indecision that occa-
sions you the present application." Pliny
was neither the first nor the last of puzzled
psychical researchers.

A century later, Lucian, in his PhilopseudAs,
characteristically ridicules a similar story
about a house in Corinth. The poltergeist
related by Pliny was of a very simple type,
merely an account of how " supernatural "
visitants cut off the hair of certain of Pliny's
servants, when they were asleep, and strewed
it about the room.

Ancient and widespread as is the belief
in hauntings, the evidence for the most part
is open to suspicion, hence few educated

HAUNTINGS AND POLTERGEISTS 189

persons have been disposed to accept a
supernormal origin for the stories, believing
that some simple explanation would be found
to cover the ground, such as rats, or owls, or
practical joking. The subject cannot, how-
ever, be so easily dismissed, for the careful
investigations made by the S.P.R. have shown
that amid much that is absurd and exaggerated
certain cases remain which cannot be explained
away by illusion or practical jokes. At the
same time we rarely find anything corre-
sponding to the traditional ghost-story, like
that of Pliny, which connects some tragedy
in a particular house or place, with the vague
and often confused accounts of sights or
sounds which perplex or terrify the observer.
We often wonder why the numerous cases care-
fully investigated by the S.P.R. and recorded
in its publications have not been used by
writers to furnish the mystery-loving public
with ghost-stories more in accordance with fact.
Here, for instance, is a remarkable case,
which has stood the test of long and search-
ing inquiry. The account was first received
in 1884 through Mr. J. W. Graham, Principal
of Dalton Hall, Manchester, and the case
subsequently investigated by Mr. Myers. To
avoid injury to the owner of the house the
locality is not stated, and also the name
" Morton " is substituted for the real family
name, but the initials are the true ones. Miss
" Morton " — a brief outline of whose account is
given below — is a lady of scientific training
and an exceptionally good witness.

190 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

" In April 1882 Captain Morton and his
family moved into a detached house at the
corner of two cross roads, with a lawn and a
short carriage-drive in front, and a garden
and small orchard at the back. It was built
in 1860, and occupied by Mr. S. and his family
for sixteen years. His wife died there one
August (year uncertain), whereupon Mr. S.
took to drink, and when, two years afterwards,
he married again his second wife contracted
the same habit. They quarrelled continually,
and a few months before his death, which
occurred in July 1876, she left him, and lived
at Clifton, till, 'in September 1878, she died
of dipsomania, and was buried about a quarter
of a mile from the house in question. After
Mr. S.'s death it was occupied for six months
by Mr. L. and his family. He died there,
and it then remained empty for about four
years, during which time the grounds are said
to have been haunted by the figure of a lady,
but the Mortons had heard no rumours.
From June 1882 until 1889 there was fre-
quently seen moving about within and with-
out the house, by day and night, the appari-
tion of a tall lady in widow's weeds, holding
a handkerchief to her face, and seemingly
weeping. The figure was believed to resemble
the second Mrs. S., but in what degree the
concealment of the face makes doubtful.
It often went into the drawing-room, taking
up a position in a window, where the second
Mrs. S. used to sit.

The wraith was first, and most frequently,

HAUNTINGS AND POLTERGEISTS 191

seen by the eldest Miss M., who followed it,
spoke to it, when it would stop as if about to
speak, but never did so; tried to touch it,
but found it elude her grasp, vanishing when
cornered, though in full view a moment before.
Then with scientific care, she tested its
immateriality by stretching lightly across
the stairs fine threads, at various heights from
the ground ; twice, at least, she saw the figure
pass through the threads, yet its passage left
them undisturbed. Its footsteps were faintly
audible. Later on it was seen by Miss M.'s
sisters and brother, to whom she had not
mentioned it, and by visitors and servants,
in all about twenty persons. Neither her
father nor her mother, who was an invalid,
ever saw it. Miss M. sometimes saw it when
other persons present did not. It often
vanished at a door leading into the garden.
Once it was seen by Miss M. and her sister to
pass from the drawing-room along the passage,
and disappear at this door, while their sister E.,
coming in from the garden, said she had seen
it emerge from the steps outside : the three
sisters then went into the garden, when af ourth
sister called from an upper window that she
had just seen it pass across the front lawn and
along the carriage-drive to the orchard. This
is a noticeable feature in the case, since it
seems probable that the figure was traced by
independent observers through the successive
points in space which a material body would
have occupied in going from the drawing-
room to the orchard; and this, prima facie.

192 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

implies some spatial relations. Mrs. Sidgwick
observes (Proc. S.P.R., vol. iii., p. 146) that,
in the absence of accurate notes of the time,
we cannot be certain that the appearances
were successive, or in the order assumed, as
a phantom might possibly appear in several
places at once — which is doubtless true; but
we seem to have no records of such an
occurrence.

The figure was seen most frequently in the
months of July, August and September,
which include the anniversaries of the deaths
of Mr. S. and his wives. The frequency was
at its maximum in the summer of 1884, after
which time the appearances became fewer,
and finally ceased in 1889. Towards the
end of this period, the figure, which had at
first looked life-like and substantial, became
shadowy and semi -transparent. There was also
a gradual cessation of the phenomena which
had occurred during these years, namely
footsteps, soft and slow — unlike those of any
in the house, — thumps on bedroom doors and
turning of the door-handles, sounds of the drag-
ging about of heavy weights, and unaccountable
lights.

Miss M., who investigated the apparition
quite fearlessly, describes herself as having
had at first " a feeling of awe, as at something
unknown, mixed with a strong desire to know
more about it." Subsequently she became
conscious of a feeling of loss, as if she had
" lost power to the figure." Most of the other
percipients were greatly alarmed, and felt

HAUNTINGS AND POLTERGEISTS 193

chilled as if by a cold wind. Two dogs in the
house were at times much terrified. Full de-
tails of this case, which Mr. Myers considered
" in some respects one of the most remarkable
and best authenticated instances of ' haunt-
ing' on record," will be found in the S.P.R.
Proceedings, vol. viii. Mr. Myers took much
trouble in the investigation of this case,
personally examined several of the witnesses,
and was convinced of the genuineness of the
whole story, which, however, loses much of its
impressiveness in the brief summary which is
all that it is possible to give in these pages.

A remarkable case of haunting occurred
some years ago in a manor-house in the mid-
land counties of England. I was invited to
investigate the case and was offered hospitality.
Though the ghost did not appear to me, whilst
I slept in the haunted room, yet I heard certain
mysterious knockings and some other dis-
turbances which accompanied it; nor could
I find any satisfactory explanation of these
sounds. The first-hand evidence on behalf
of the ghostly figure was, however, abundant
and surprising. It was seen in the house
independently by nearly a dozen different
persons, who at first believing it to be a
practical joke, tried to catch it, but it was
uncatchable and impalpable; the latter was
proved by a young officer, who when staying
in the house saw the phantom one night, rose
from his bed, followed it and shot through
the figure, which moved on unconcerned. The
children of my host, from whom the story of
o

194 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

the ghost had been carefully concealed,
described the same figure, which did not
frighten, but rather amused, them, as they
said " they could see the wall of the school-
room through its body."

Another case of haunting investigated by
myself and also by Professor Sidgwick,
occurred not far from my own residence in
Kingstown. Here the phantom of a woman
wrapped in a grey shawl was seen on the stairs
and in a particular bedroom of a house tenanted
by a lady and her brother. The figure was
seen by different occupants of the room and by
a child of five years old, though none were
previously aware of the ghostly visitant : the
door of the room was locked, yet still the figure
made its appearance to the occupier of the
room. All attempts at a normal explanation
failed and the occupiers had at last to leave
the house. Subsequently it was found that
some previous tenants of the house had been
troubled by inexplicable disturbances of vari-
ous kinds, details of which they gave. (Proc.
S.P.R., vol. ii., p. 141.)

In all these cases one is naturally very
sceptical that really similar phantoms have
been seen quite independently. Even if the
ghost be actually seen by the investigator, it
is easier to assume that the figure is a pure
hallucination, or some real person playing a
trick. I confess, however, that a careful con-
sideration of first-hand evidence has led me to
the same conclusion at which Mrs. Sidgwick,
one of the most critical and able of investi-

HAUNTINGS AND POLTERGEISTS 195

gators, arrived so far back as 1885, namely,
that in spite of all reasonable scepticism, it
is difficult " to avoid accepting, at least pro-
visionally, the conclusion that there are, in a
certain sense, haunted houses, i. e. that there
are houses in which similar quasi-human
apparitions have occurred at different times
to different inhabitants, under circumstances
which exclude the hypothesis of suggestion or
expectation" (Proc. S.P.R., vol. iii., p. 142).

Here is a typical case of haunting, resting
on the evidence of educated persons who tried
in vain to account for what was seen : full
details are given in the Journal of the S.P.R.,
vols. vi. and ix. In 1892, Miss Scott, living
at St. Boswells, Roxburghshire, upon walking
home one afternoon in May, saw a tall man
dressed in black a few yards in front of her.
He turned a corner of the road, being still in
view when he suddenly disappeared, although
no exit seemed possible. Hurrying on to find
what had become of him she met her sister,
who was looking round bewildered; she too
had seen the same figure, whom she took to
be a clergyman, but the figure suddenly van-
ished and search yielded no clue.

In the July following, at the same place,
Miss Scott again saw the same figure, the upper
part of which was also seen by another sister
who was walking with her; it was dressed
like an old clergyman in knee-breeches, silk
stockings, buckled shoes, white cravat and
low-crowned hat. Resolved not to lose sight
of him this time Miss Scott kept her eyes fixed
G 2

196 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

on the figure, but both sisters saw it gradually
fade away before their eyes. Again in June,
the next year, Miss Scott, walking one morning
near the same place, saw the same apparition.
Determined to solve the mystery she rushed
to overtake it, but it seemed to glide away in
front of her, then it stopped, turned round and
faced her, enabling her to note in minute detail
the features and dress, that of a Scotch clergy-
man of a century ago. Finally the figure again
faded away by the roadside.

Other persons also independently testified
to having seen the same figure at the same
place. One lady, Miss Irvine, was attracted
by the quaint dress of the old clergyman, and
watched him walking to and fro by the hedge-
side, when, to her astonishment, the figure
vanished when she was about three yards off.
The various witnesses gave separate written
and concordant reports of what they had seen.
The figure was not further seen until 1897,
when Miss Scott and one of her sisters again
saw it, noting the thin white features and dress
of the phantom ; they had not been thinking
of it and are sure it was no morbid hallucina-
tion or illusion of their senses, or practical
joke. A plan was sent of the road and locality,
with the positions marked where different
persons had seen the apparition. In July
1900 Miss Scott saw the figure again on two
occasions near the same spot, and wrote an
account to the S.P.R. the next day. Persons
employed on that particular road have been
interrogated, but have never seen the phantom,

HAUNTINGS AND POLTERGEISTS 197

nor has a man who passes up and down the road
to the village every morning and evening.

It is very difficult to believe Miss Scott and
the other percipients were all mistaken, and
it is equally difficult to frame any theory to
account for the persistence of the phantom
in this spot, except by the hypothesis given
below.

The case of the " haunted house at Willing-
ton " has been a familiar theme on Tyneside
for half a century, and accounts of it have
appeared in various publications. The best
report will be found in vol. v. of the Journal
of the S.P.R., where Mr. J. Proctor, a member
of the Society of Friends, who was born in
the house, gives a vivid account of his ex-
perience of the hauntings and of their wholly
inexplicable character.

Other cases might be quoted, which, like
the two preceding ones, suggest that some
kind of local imprint, on material structures
or places, has been left by some past events
occurring to certain persons, who, when on
earth, lived or were closely connected with
that particular locality ; an echo or phantom
of these events becoming perceptible to those
now living who happen to be endowed with
some special psychic sensitiveness. Although
this theory seems extravagant and incredible,
there are not wanting analogies to it both in
the domain of physics and psychical research.
A coin left on a pane of glass and after some
time removed, leaves a local imprint which
may be revealed by breathing on the glass;

198 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

pieces of wood, coal, and many other materials
laid on a photographic plate and then removed,
leave a " local imprint " so that the very
structure of the materials is revealed when the
plate is developed, it may be long after. The
causes of these and other curious phenomena
are now known, but this cannot be said of
somewhat analogous phenomena in psychical
research.

Certain sensitives are said to be able to
detect, or " psychometrize " as they call it,
the influence left on material objects worn
by an absent or deceased person. Whether
this be the case or not, there are some startling
and well -attested phenomena related by the
older mesmerists which apparently indicate
that some specific influence is left on a material
object by the passes of a mesmerizer. The
scientific objections to a specific effluence are
perhaps not so formidable now that we are
acquainted with certain physical and psychical
facts that would have been deemed utterly
incredible a century ago.

In the early years of the S.P.R., Mr. Gurney
was present with me when certain hypnotic
experiments were made, in the rooms of the
Society and under our direction. The results
of these experiments seemed so incredible
that I believe they were never published.
Any particular book or coin or other object
over which the hypnotizer had made a few
passes, or even pointed his fingers, could be
detected by a sensitive subject, who was
subsequently brought by us into the room,

HAUNTINGS AND POLTERGEISTS 199

from which the hypnotizer had in the mean-
while been excluded and the positions of the
objects then changed by us. In fact, every
precaution was taken to avoid collusion or
any direct knowledge being gained by the
subject, who was not entranced at the time.
Finally, we were driven to telepathy as a
possible explanation; but even this seemed
unlikely, for our presence in the room made
no difference, nor was any difference found
when we did not know which object had been
treated by the hypnotist. Here, as in many
other problems of psychical research, we have
no solution to offer, and must leave future
investigators to confirm or disprove the results
we obtained.

To return to the subject of hauntings,
different theories have been suggested —

(1) The popular view that the apparition
belongs to the external world like ordinary
matter, and would be there whether the per-
cipient was present or not. Some cases appear
to support this view, such as the one to which
I have already referred (p. 191), in which the
phantom was followed from place to place and
seen by different independent observers at
successive points. This theory, however, has
insuperable difficulties, among others that of
accounting for the clothes of the ghost, and
it may be dismissed. (2) That the phanfcom
was projected from the mind of the percipient,
and was, therefore, a hallucination; not a
baseless one, but created by a telepathic
impact from the mind of a deceased person.

200 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

Here we have the difficulty of explaining why
the phantasm should be dependent on a par-
ticular locality, although with our present
knowledge this theory appears the most
plausible. (3) That the phantom was due
merely to expectancy and telepathically
transferred from one mind to another. This
may account for some cases such as the two
that will be cited immediately. (4) That some
subtle physical influence is left in the building
or locality which affects certain brains and
creates the hallucination. This, Mrs. Sidgwick
remarks, " one can hardly expect to appear
plausible," albeit it corresponds best to a
certain part of the evidence, and from what
has been said on a previous page cannot be
hastily rejected. To these we may add an
extension of the second theory that hauntings
are due to dreams of the deceased, telepathi-
cally projecting scenes of their life on earth to
some persons there present. Finally, those
who have not made a study of the subject
will have their own theory that all the alleged
phenomena are due to delusion or fraud.

A lively imagination stimulated by expect-
ancy probably accounts for the two following
cases. Early in 1911 a book entitled An
Adventure was published in London, giving an
account of the experiences of two ladies on
visiting Versailles some ten years ago, when
they appeared to be transported into the times
of Marie Antoinette. On more than one visit
they thought they saw the surroundings of
the place and the people therein, as their

HAUNTINGS AND POLTERGEISTS 201

subsequent investigations showed might have
been the case had they been present during
the life of Marie Antoinette. This narrative,
however, when examined for the S.P.R.,
appears to be based on slender evidence and
trivial incidents, undesignedly amplified by
the authors, and cannot be accepted as of
any real evidential value. In some points it
resembles a story of apparent obsession by
Marie Antoinette, sent to the S.P.R. Journal
by Mrs. Stapleton, and published in June
1907, but the stories have no connection with
one another. Both are instances of several
dream romances inspired by the history of
the ill-fated Queen, the best known of them
being the case of Helene Smith, who regarded
herself as a reincarnation of Marie Antoinette.
This interesting romance of a "secondary
personality " is described in an able book by
Professor Flournoy, a summary of which is
given by Mr. Myers in Human Personality,
vol. ii., p. 130 et seq.

The other case is as follows : About 9 p.m.
on May 8, 1885, a gardener named Bard,
returning from work, passed through Hinxton
churchyard, in Essex, and thought he saw
his former employer, Mrs. de Freville, leaning
on the railings round her husband's tomb, five
or six yards distant. He recognized her black
mantle and poke-bonnet, and her face, which
was paler than usual. He supposed her to be,
as was her habit, visiting the tomb, and he
kept his eye on her as he walked round the
railings to see if the gate into the vault were

202 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

open, but stumbled over a grass-tussock,
and when he looked again the figure had
disappeared. He found the gate locked, and
could see her nowhere in the churchyard.
Looking at the clock, he saw that it was 9.20.
On reaching home, he told his wife, as she
testifies, that he had seen Mrs. de Freville.
On that afternoon, about seven hours earlier,
Mrs. de Freville had died very suddenly in
London, but this was unknown in Hinxton
until the next day. This case, which was
carefully investigated for the S.P.R., rests on
strong evidence with respect to the character of
the percipient, a highly intelligent and trust-
worthy man, and the closeness of the coin-
cidence. Its weak points are : (1) that he
might have already heard of the death — this,
however, is very improbable; (2) he saw the
figure two hours after sunset on a moonless
evening, when, unless there was unusually
bright starlight, or an unusually prolonged
after-glow, it must have been very dark;
(3) he said himself that he half thought he
had imagined it; (4) churchyards suggest
fancies of the kind.

The term "haunting '! is usually restricted to
those cases where quasi-human phantoms are
seen at different times by different persons in
a particular locality. Neither the last case
nor the next are hauntings in this sense, but
the following is interesting theoretically, for
the supposed ghost was alive at the timej
this case rests upon excellent evidence.

In December 1896, Mrs. Blaikie was staying

HAUNTINGS AND POLTERGEISTS 203

away from home in Edinburgh, where, on
December 10, she fell ill with an attack of
acute laryngitis. About 11 p.m. on December
11, her three women servants were sitting by
the kitchen fire in her house, when they heard
steps exactly like hers coming from the hall
towards the nursery door. They all went
to the door leading from the kitchen to the
nursery passage, but saw nothing. At the
same time her daughter Frances, while un-
dressing in her room, heard coming along the
passage to the door footsteps heavy and rather
quick, exactly like her mother's, and unlike
any of the servants', though she supposed it
must be one of them until they all came in
alarm to ask if it had been she. The other
daughter, Jeanie, in her room up-stairs, had
also heard steps exactly like her mother's,
but conjectured burglars; however, on the
house being searched, nothing was found to
account for the sounds.

Mrs. Blaikie writes : " On the evening of
December 11, about eleven o'clock, I had
such a sensation of being suffocated that
I felt as if I were dying, and would never see
my home again. I was suddenly filled with
an overpowering longing to be at home, and
whether I fell asleep for a few moments and
dreamed I do not know, but it seemed the
next minute as if my desire was granted, and
I felt I was actually there. I was conscious
of walking along the passage past the dressing-
room door, and towards the room we call the
nursery, but I had hardly time to realize my

204 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

own joy and relief when I found myself still
lying in bed, and the feeling of suffocation,
from which I had had such a happy respite for
a few moments, again tormenting me. When
I returned home a week later I was told of the
curious occurrence on the evening of Friday,
the llth" (Journal S.P.R., vol. viii., p. 320).

How are we to account for this collective
hallucination ? Had it some normal explana-
tion, or was it a telepathic impression conveyed
to one of the daughters, and did this start a
similar impression on the other percipients,
or was it simultaneously impressed on all ?
We have no experimental evidence on behalf
of either of these latter hypotheses. Mr.
Myers, from this and several similar cases,
was led to adopt the idea of a temporary
excursion' of the spirit to the place where it
desired to be, in some unknown way being
able to make its presence perceptible. It
is improbable that any physical instrument
could detect and record the sounds heard,
though the experiment is worth trying.
Would a sensitive flame, for instance, which
is affected by the feeblest sounds, have
detected the footsteps or rustling of Mrs.
Blaikie's phantasmal dress ? Would a photo-
graphic plate record an apparition ? I am
inclined to think not in either case.

In passing, it may here be remarked
that the evidence for so-called spirit photo-
graphy is wholly inconclusive, most alleged
cases are pure fraud. The impression in all
phantasms, I believe, is made directly on

HAUNTINGS AND POLTERGEISTS 205

the mind of the percipients and not through
their organs of hearing or sight. The mind
then projects the impression outside itself,
and hears sounds and sees visions apparently
in external space. But why this particular
impression ? Why should Mrs. Blaikie's spirit
have been able to conjure up only the sound
of her footsteps and the rustling of her dress ?
Were the details of her presence fashioned by
the transmitting or receiving mind, or by
both ? Possibly the result was due to the
subconscious and symbolical manner in which
the personality of a friend is conceived, whose
presence is suggested telepathically. But tele-
pathy is only a provisional explanation, and
is completely out of court in the still more
puzzling phenomena of poltergeists, to which
we must now turn.

POLTERGEISTS

We have no exact English equivalent for
the German word " Poltergeist," usually
translated " hobgoblin " ; a " polterer " in
German is a noisy or boisterous fellow, and a
" poltergeist " is therefore a boisterous ghost.
The phenomena are sporadic, breaking out
suddenly in some place and disappearing after
a few weeks or months of annoyance to those
concerned. Unlike hauntings, the disturb-
ances appear to gather round a particular,
usually young, person in a particular place.
All kinds of mischievous pranks are played,
objects are thrown about, bells rung, furniture

206 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

moved, noises made, all utterly meaningless.
And the closest scrutiny fails, in genuine
cases, to discover any conceivable explana-
tion, except some unseen agency.

Similar phenomena are recorded in different
countries throughout the world, and go back
to a remote period of time. No doubt in part
they gave rise, as Mr. A. Lang suggests, to
fetishism among savage races, i. e. a belief
that an inanimate object may be tenanted by
what is thought to be a spirit. One of the
best-attested English cases of poltergeists
occurred in 1661, and is known as the " Demon,
or drummer, of Ted worth." This was
minutely investigated and described by one
of the most critical among the early Fellows
of the Royal Society, the Rev. J. Glanvil, who
published a full account of this case in his
well-known book, Sadudsmus Triumphatus.
Briefly, the facts are as follows. A Mr.
Mompesson, a magistrate in Tedworth, Wilts,
ordered the arrest of a vagrant drummer
in 1661. Shortly afterwards at Mr. Mom-
pesson's house began an amazing series of
unaccountable noises and disturbances which
continued for two years. The drummer was
tried for witchcraft but acquitted, and the
disturbances went on when he was far off in
jail. The evidence as to these disturbances
was given on oath at this trial and the eye-
witnesses were numerous. Glanvil himself
came to investigate, and relates that he saw
chairs move about without any one touching
them, shoes thrown by invisible hands, that

HAUNTINGS AND POLTERGEISTS 207

he heard scratchings on the bed, etc., all the
phenomena apparently clustering round Mr.
Mompesson's two young children. They were
naturally suspected, but Glanvil relates how
he convinced himself, as others had been con-
vinced, that it was quite impossible for the
children to have played these tricks, which
often occurred in daylight before the eyes of
numerous sceptical inquirers.

Omitting many other similar cases in
Scotland and different parts of England, we
come to the famous case of the disturbances
at Ep worth vicarage during the Rev. S.
Wesley's residence there in 1716. These
formed the subject of a long investigation and
careful record by his son, John Wesley, the
founder of Methodism, who came to the
conclusion that their origin was " Satanic,"
a not unnatural conclusion as the following
entries in the journal of Mr. Wesley, senr.,
show —

" December 25. — The noises were so violent
it was vain to think of going to sleep. Decem-
ber 27. — They [the disturbances] were so
boisterous I did not care to leave my family."
Again he writes : " I have been thrice pushed
by an invisible power, once against my desk
in the study, a second time against the door
of the matted chamber, a third against the
frame of my study door as I was going in."
Their mastiff seemed more afraid than the
children, as it came whining to them when
the disturbances arose. Sou they, in his Life
of Wesley, states that " the testimony ... is

208 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

far too strong to be set aside because of the
strangeness of the relation."

Then, in 1834, we have the remarkable case
of " Sealing bells," investigated and related
by Major Moor, F.R.S. Here, day after day
for nearly two months, the bells of the house
were continually ringing in broad daylight,
no known cause being discovered; the bell-
wires were in full view and a careful watch
kept, until at last Major Moor was thoroughly
convinced the ringing was by no human
agency; the inmates were driven from the
house and the mystery never cleared up.

Similar inexplicable cases of bell -ringing
have occurred elsewhere. One such case,
associated with other poltergeist phenomena,
was critically investigated in Massachusetts
in 1868. Not only were the bell-wires de-
tached and the bells suspended near a lofty
ceiling, but they continued to ring and were
seen ringing in daylight whilst observers kept
watch. The phenomena began after the
arrival of a maidservant, who, of course, was
suspected, but it was soon found impossible
for her to be the culprit, as the bell-ringing and
violent pitching about of furniture occurred
when she was observed to be quietly at her
work in another room. The investigation
appears to have been a very thorough and
careful one, yet no explanation could be
found.

Perhaps the most conclusive evidence for
poltergeist phenomena is that given on oath
in connection with Cideville parsonage, a

HAUNTINGS AND POLTERGEISTS 209

place some thirty miles from Havre. Here,
in 1850-51, knockings, movements of furni-
ture, noises of all kinds occurred in daylight,
and every would-be exposer of the mystery
was baffled.

In 1877 I investigated a remarkable
poltergeist occurring in an Irish farmer's
cabin a few miles from Enniskillen. I was
aided in the inquiry by two sceptical scientific
friends, but we were all convinced that the
phenomena could not be accounted for by
any known agency. In an article published
in the Dublin University Magazine for 1877, I
gave a detailed account of these occurrences
and the precautions taken to avoid the
possibility of trickery. Here, in my presence,
violent knockings and scratchings were heard,
but the closest scrutiny on the part of three
critical observers failed to account for them.

More recently in Enniscorthy, a town in
Co. Wexford, I have investigated a case of
poltergeist that occurred in July 1910. Here
the disturbances centred round a young
carpenter, and, though they had ceased when
I visited the spot, the testimony of various
witnesses convinced me that it was practically
impossible to attribute them to the lad or to
any other human being. For two sceptical
and intelligent investigators were present one
night when unaccountable knockings and
amazing disturbances took place. The bed-
clothes were pulled off the bed on which the
lad was sleeping, the bed itself was pulled into
the middle of the room and the lad lifted off

210 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

the bed and deposited gently on the floor.
The light was sufficient to enable them to see
that no practical jokes were being played.
The reader who may be interested will find
a full report of this and other cases in my
paper on Poltergeists, in the Proceedings of the
S.P.R., vol. xxv. In earlier volumes and in the
Journal of that Society will be found other
well-attested cases of poltergeist occurring in
England and on the Continent.

What are we to say to these mysterious and
bizarre phenomena ? The witnesses had cer-
tainly nothing to gain by narrating them, for,
as Glanvil remarks of Mr. Mompesson, " he
suffered in his name, his estate, and all his
affairs, and in the general peace of his family
and loss of his servants and of his health,"
through the occurrences. Fraud, mal-obser-
vation, misdescription, illusion, etc., doubtless
explain some cases, but are, in my opinion,
inadequate to account for all the cases.
Imitation of some of the phenomena by
children and others may, and does sometimes,
occur, but is likely to be, and indeed in some
such cases has been, quickly detected.

Confronted by these perplexing phenomena,
all we can do is to continue collecting and
sifting the evidence with scrupulous care,
hoping that in time patient inquiry will
throw some light on these investigations as
it has done on some of the sporadic and
puzzling phenomena of meteorology.

CHAPTER XIV

THE PHYSICAL PHENOMENA OF SPIRITUALISM

ONE of the objects which the Society for
Psychical Research was founded to investigate
is officially described as follows : " An Inquiry
into various alleged phenomena apparently
inexplicable by known laws of nature and
commonly referred by Spiritualists to the
agency of extra-terrene intelligences, and by
others to some unknown physical force."
These phenomena include the alleged move-
ment of both light and heavy objects without
known cause, responsive raps and other
sounds, luminous appearances, the levitation
of human beings, etc., etc.

Whether such an inquiry is thought worthy
of serious attention or not depends upon the
degree of knowledge or amount of prejudice
one happens to possess. The question to be
considered is not any particular theory as to
the origin of these phenomena, but whether
they are really supernormal, or an exhibition
of credulity, ignorance and imposture. The
repugnance with which the whole subject
is widely regarded is very natural; for the
alleged phenomena only occur in the presence
211

212 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

of a " medium " and usually in darkness ;
moreover, a class of paid professional mediums
has arisen, several of whom — a particularly
detestable class of rogues — have been caught
in barefaced trickery. The necessity for a
medium need not concern us; some inter-
mediary, animate or inanimate, between the
seen and unseen is requisite in the physical
as well as in the psychical world, as remarked
earlier, whenever unseen agencies are rendered
perceptible to the senses. What peculiar
psychological state constitutes a medium we
have not the remotest idea ; sex, age, and
education are alike immaterial. In other
departments of psychical research no injurious
effect on the psychic or medium, so far as I
know, has ever been observed ; here, however,
there seems to be in many cases a deteriorating
influence as incomprehensible as that which
sometimes occurs among " horsey " people.
But we don't blame the horse or reject its
services on this account, and we have no right
to exclude from scientific. inquiry any subject
because it appears repellent from its associa-
tions. The dogmatic refusal to listen to
evidence is no less reprehensible than the
temper of uncritical acceptance of these
phenomena by many spiritualists.

Two conditions are obviously essential for
any satisfactory investigation of these pheno-
mena. One is the presence of good light for
observation, and the other the absence of any
pecuniary motive on the part of the medium ;
even so the love of notoriety often affords as

PHYSICAL PHENOMENA 213

strong a motive as the love of money — of this
I could relate more than one instance in the
course of my inquiries. Hence the difficulty
which many on the Council of the Society
for Psychical Research have experienced in
arriving at any definite conclusions in this
obscure region, inasmuch as the requisite
conditions are not often attainable. But
throughout psychical research we invariably
find that phenomena which have been alleged to
occur experimentally, are paralleled if genuine
by similar phenomena which occur spontane-
ously and sporadically. Now the undeniable
evidence (in my opinion) on behalf of polter-
geists affords ground for belief in similar
phenomena occurring experimentally. Rap-
pings, disturbances of all kinds, the movement
of objects without contact, etc., have in fact
taken place, as testified by many observers,
without the presence of a paid medium,
sometimes in good light and with every
precaution which ingenuity could suggest to
prevent trickery.

On the other hand, the Society for Psychical
Research have shown that mal-observation
accounts for many of the marvels attested by
good witnesses. The attention is so easily
diverted that an investigator may honestly
believe he kept his eyes continuously fixed
on the medium, when actually he did nothing
of the kind. This, however, assumes that
the medium, intentionally or otherwise, was
able to take advantage of movements when
the attention of the investigator was relaxed.

214

PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

Moreover, the long series of experiments which
Sir W. Crookes made with the medium, Mr.
D. Home, under stringent test conditions,
when he obtained the most amazing pheno-
mena, demonstrates either that the occur-
rences actually took place, or that Sir William
was the victim of hallucination. This latter
explanation is plausible, and was indeed
adopted for some time by myself, but personal
acquaintance with the phenomena convinced
me it was quite inadequate. The limits of space
will only allow me to give a brief reference
to a fragment of my own experience; for
further information on this long-disputed
subject the reader should consult various
papers on both sides by Mrs. Sidgwick, Mr.
Myers, Dr. Hodgson, Sir W. Crookes, myself,
and others, published in the Proceedings of
the S.P.R. (see vols. iv., vi., vii., ix., etc.), or
the new edition of my book entitled On the
Threshold of a New World of Thought.

When a sceptic as to the reality of these
physical or telekinetic phenomena, it so hap-
pened that I was able to investigate some
inexplicable rappings and movement of
objects that occurred in the presence of a
child, the daughter of an acquaintance who
was residing for the season in a house near
my own. Here the occurrences took place
in broad daylight, frequently with no one
present but myself and the child, and I sought
in vain for some normal explanation. Vigor-
ous raps, which had an intelligent origin —
for upon pointing to the letters of the

PHYSICAL PHENOMENA 215

alphabet they spelt out answers to questions
— came on the table, on the back of my chair
and sometimes in a far distant part of the
room. Even when I asked the young medium
to lie on the sofa and firmly held her hands and
feet, no other person being present, the raps
came as before, and upon repeating the alpha-
bet aloud, a rap at particular letters answered
any question I put. The answers were such
as the child would give, and the misspelling
of words corresponded to those made by the
young medium, as afterwards was ascertained.
Nevertheless, I am perfectly certain that she
could not have produced the sounds, nor
could she have lifted the heavy mahogany
dining-table, which sometimes rose some six
inches with only one leg resting on the floor,
and this in full sunlight, with our hands gently
resting on the top and in view the whole time.
Nor was I the victim of hallucination, for
on the numerous occasions wherein I tested
every plausible explanation, this hypothesis
was always in my mind and was completely
discredited. The child's music-master in-
formed me that raps, often very loud, would
come inside the piano when his pupil was
practising and grew listless ; they came on a
garden seat in the lawn and on an umbrella
handle, whenever the young medium was near.
After a few years the annoyance faded away,
to the relief of all concerned.

Some time subsequently I had the oppor-
tunity of some sittings with the niece of a well-
known photographer, when even more remark-

216 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

able and unaccountable phenomena occurred*
I will only mention one incident. The room
was brightly lighted with gas, and after sundry
raps had spelt out a message, a small table,
untouched by any one, came hobbling across
the room towards me until it imprisoned me
in the arm-chair on which I was sitting. There
were no threads or wires or any known cause
for the movement of the table, nor for other
movement of objects witnessed by me in
excellent light.

But these marvels are slight compared to
the amazing phenomena recorded by Sir W.
Crookes during his investigations with Home
and another medium. It is needless to detail
the facts, as they are generally known, and
incredible as they appear, Sir W. Crookes is
far too skilled and accurate an observer to
allow any doubt as to the precautions he took
to avoid fraud. In fact, all the phenomena
took place in his own house, and many of the
more startling occurrences under the blaze
of an electric light. As some persons were
under the impression that his conviction of the
supernormal character of these manifestations
had been shaken, Sir William Crookes in his
presidential address to the British Association
in 1898 stated that was not the case, and that
he adhered to the statements he had published.
Although Home has been accused of fraud,
Mr. Myers and myself could obtain no evidence
in support of this charge. We published a
joint paper in the Journal of the S.P.R. for
July 1889, giving the result of our invcstiga-

PHYSICAL PHENOMENA 21T

tions and a summary of some of the astonish-
ing phenomena attested by excellent witnesses,

Here, for instance, is the testimony of a.
well-known lawyer, the late Mr. W. M,
Wilkinson, which he sent to us. He states
that in the winter of 1869 " I saw Mr. Home
take out of our drawing-room fire a red-hot coal
a little smaller than a cricket-ball and carry
it up and down the room. He said to Lord
Adare, now Earl Dunraven, who was present,
' Will you take it from me, it will not hurt
you.' Lord Adare took it from him and
held it in his hand for about half a minute.
Before he threw it in the fire, I put my hand
close to it and felt the heat like that of a live
coal." This handling of white-hot bodies
with impunity by Home has been described
to me by several eye-witnesses. Lord Craw-
ford also saw it done on eight occasions;
Sir W. Crookes saw it, and states no known
chemical preparation (had Home used any)
could have preserved the skin from injury,
and yet there was no sign of burning.
Another phenomenon, that of levitation, was
witnessed by several good observers. In
past time, the handling of fire and walking
through the fire, and the levitation of the
body have been recorded of many persons,
in many parts of the world.

What can be said of these miracles ? They
are so foreign to ordinary experience, that even
the testimony of numerous and distinguished
witnesses fails to carry conviction to the
majority of readers. And yet it is impossible

218 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

to reject the evidence, and it seems incon-
ceivable that so many critical and sceptical
observers were all mistaken or the victims of
hallucination. For I might quote scientific
men, trained observers, throughout the Con-
tinent and America as well as in England,
who after long and patient inquiry have been
driven to a belief in the genuineness of the
phenomena, the explanation of which all agree
must be found in some department of know-
ledge new to science. Professors Richet,
Lombroso, Morselli, and other physiologists
and psychologists of note; Professor Schia-
perelli, Sir Oliver Lodge, Dr. A. R. Wallace,
and many other famous men, including others
of a past generation like that great exposer
of humbugs, Professor De Morgan, — all unite
in giving their testimony to the reality of
some of these telekinetic phenomena.

If, as all religions assume, life exists in the
unseen, creatures of varied type and capacity
may exist there as well as here; some may be
able to act upon material objects and even
on the molecules themselves. It is true that
the things done appear trivial, meaningless
and incomprehensible from our present point
of view. But as a great savant has remarked,
" Only in proportion to the difficulty there
seems of admitting the facts should be the
scrupulous attention we bestow on their
examination." That is now being done, and
with that we must pass from this branch of
our subject.

CHAPTER XV

AUTOMATIC WRITING
CROSS-CORRESPONDENCE

WE must now pass on to the phenomena
of the messages, spoken or written, which
appear to be delivered involuntarily and
automatically, and which are a fruitful
though difficult branch of our inquiry. The
main source, indeed, of the most remarkable
evidence recently obtained has been auto-
matic writing, in conjunction, at times, with
automatic speech. This curious faculty,
commonly possessed by those who are en-
dowed with any " mediumistic " gifts, may
be said to manifest itself in an extremely
rudimentary form whenever anybody takes
a pencil and scribbles on a scrap of paper,
while thinking about something else. With
some persons who have had the patience to
sit regularly, and as passively as possible,
the product varies in value from meaningless
scrawls to messages which purport to be the
words of an intelligence other than the writer's.
Much care and patience, however, are re-
quired in sifting the messages so received;
219

220 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

for even when we are convinced that a cer-
tain message, or fragment of it, is not attri-
butable to the conscious self of the writer,
nor to telepathy from some living person,
it may come from some deeper stratum, the
subliminal self of the writer's own personality.

Still, abundant evidence, dating from very
ancient times to our own, shows that messages
have been thus received, with contents
attesting their supernormal origin/ Some-
times one comes to the recipient as a single
experience, never repeated; sometimes such
communications seem to haunt a place or
a person, described then respectively as an
oracle and a medium, though to the presence
of a medium the phenomena are no doubt
in both cases really due, a fact which may be
inferred from the cessation of oracles, and
the persistence of mediums. In earlier days
when facilities for writing were fewer than
now, these communications usually took the
form of voices, as they did many centuries
since with Joan of Arc, and yet farther back
with Socrates, historic cases, the psycho-
logical problems presented by which owe
to Mr. F. W. H. Myers their only adequate
exposition.

Socrates, eminently shrewd and sane, tells
us that he was guided in the affairs and crises
of his life by a warning voice — " the demon
of Socrates " ; and even if these monitions
were, for the most part, such as his own
wiser self might possibly have given, this
could hardly be said of the unlettered Maid

AUTOMATIC WRITING 221

of Orleans, whose " voices " gave her counsels
transcending any act of her conscious reason.
To call them intuitions does not explain their
origin, and as little as the monitions of
Socrates can they be classed as signs of
incipient madness. "To be sane," as Mr.
Myers says, "is to be adjusted to our en-
vironment, to be capable of coping with the
facts around us. Tried by this test, it is
Socrates and Joan who should be our types
of sanity."

Our limits will not allow us to sketch,
however briefly, the ancient and modern
history of this faculty. It was never more
abundantly manifested than at the present
time, though no written report of its investi-
gation, still less this brief summary of a
fragment of the evidence, can convey the im-
pression produced on all who have had long
personal experience in this branch of inquiry.

Forty years ago my attention was drawn to
this subject by the perusal of numerous MS.
books containing automatic writing, which
came unbidden through the hand of a per-
sonal friend, a lady well known in the educa-
tional and philanthropic world of London for
the high capacity and sobriety of judgment
she brought to bear on the various Boards of
which she was an esteemed member. These
MS. books contained handwriting, sentiments,
and modes of expression unlike those of my
friend, as she was known to us all, while, amid
much irrelevant verbosity, information un-
known to the automatist was occasionally

222 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

given, proving on inquiry to be correct. The
writing was frequently interrupted by the
invasion of other influences, some of a lower
type and wholly alien to the character of my
friend.

I might quote many instances of automatic
writing and drawing which have occurred
more recently among my acquaintances. One,
the wife of a late eminent colonial Lord Chief
Justice, had a strange experience : though in
her normal state quite unable to draw, her
hand, when allowed to remain passive, rapidly
sketched in the twilight most exquisite faces,
which she completely failed to imitate by
conscious volition. Another, the aged mother
of a famous dramatic author, though also in
her normal state quite incapable of drawing
a line, involuntarily sketched fantastic and
intricate foliage, with a precision and skill
possible only to a gifted artist.

But the most remarkable series of automatic
scripts, which drew public attention to the
whole subject, came through the hand of the
late Rev. W. Stainton Moses, M.A., who for
twenty years was an able and much-respected
master in London University College School ;
he was a Vice-President of the S.P.R. at
its foundation, and intimately known to me.
The writings, continued from 1873 to 1883,
coming through an Oxford M.A., known for
his high integrity and sound judgment, are of
great value, enhanced by the more recent
evidence obtained for alleged spirit control.
The twenty-four lengthy note-books of auto-

AUTOMATIC WRITING 223

matic script left by Mr. Moses, and partially
published by him, were carefully and criti-
cally examined by Mr. Myers, who has given
a detailed analysis of them in vols. ix. and xi.
of the S.P.R. Proceedings, and in vol. ii. of
his work on Human Personality.

The caligraphy of these scripts, unlike Mr.
Moses' own large, thick, and rapid writing,
was said to be fine, minute, regular, and
beautiful. He tells us that to avoid as far
as possible the influence of his own conscious
thoughts on the writing, he occupied himself
with other subjects, even reading abstruse
books, and following a chain of close reason-
ing, all the time that his hand was writing long,
elaborate messages, given without a single
correction, with great vigour and beauty of
style. He never could command the writing :
it came unsought, a sudden, irresistible power
impelling him to write, and sometimes indeed
causing him to fall into a trance, when he
spoke under " control " words of which he had
no recollection on returning to his normal state.

The nature and effect of his automatic
writings, and the teaching they inculcated,
convinced Mr. Moses that he was merely the
amanuensis of the lofty, discarnate spirits
from whom they purported to come ; and the
result was a profound change in his whole
spiritual outlook, the life of the unseen world
becoming to him an ever-present and vivid
reality.

Nevertheless, were there no further evidence
than this, these writings might conceivably

224 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

be produced by his own subliminal self; but
there is evidence in Mr. Moses' script of super-
normal knowledge. In three cases he had
distinct prevision of a death before the news
was generally known. One was the death
of President Garfield twelve hours before even
a rumour of it had reached England. Another
was that of a man who threw himself under
a steam-roller in Baker Street, London. A
former member of the S.P.R. Council, well
known to me, was with Mr. Moses at the time,
and has narrated the whole occurrence. Mr.
Moses' hand suddenly drew a rough sketch
of some horsed vehicle, and then wrote : "I
killed myself to-day, Baker Street ; " after
which, passing into a trance, Mr. Moses,
greatly agitated, said : " Yes, yes, killed myself
to-day under a steam-roller — yes, yes, killed
myself." No one present knew what this
meant, but later on, an evening paper related
that a cabman had that day committed suicide
in Baker Street by throwing himself under a
ijteam-roller.

Perhaps the most remarkable of these com-
munications was that purporting to be from
a lady who died on a Sunday in a country
house two hundred miles from London,the tele-
graphed announcement of her death appearing
in Monday's Times. Mr. Moses had once met
this lady and her husband at a seance, but
knew nothing about her, or of her illness and
death. On this Sunday night, in his North
London lodgings, his hand wrote an announce-
ment of her death; and a few days later she

AUTOMATIC WRITING 225

purported to write herself, saying that the
handwriting was like her own, as evidence of
her identity. There is no reason to believe
that Mr. Moses had ever seen this lady's
handwriting. On receiving other messages,
which contained private matters relative to
her, Mr. Moses gummed down these pages of
his MS. book, marking it outside " private
matter," and mentioned them to no one.
On Mr. Moses' death, years afterwards, Mr.
Myers, authorized by the executors, opened
the pages, and to his surprise found that the
communications were from a lady whom he had
known, and with whom he had corresponded.
The handwriting in the script was considered
on comparison by Mr. Myers, her son, and
an expert, to resemble unmistakably that of
her own letters, and the contents of the
communication were characteristic ; a curious
sequence of coincidences thus leading to the
verification of the case.

During some years past the Society for
Psychical Research has devoted much atten-
tion to a number of automatic writers,
including, among others, Mrs. Piper, Mrs.
Verrall and her daughter, Mrs. Holland,
Mrs. Forbes, and Mrs. Willett. Why ladies
more than men should have these psychical
gifts we do not know; certainly not one of
the ladies named could be classed as an hysteri-
cal or romancing person. The reason may
perhaps be that they have, as a rule, more
leisure in which to cultivate gifts of the kind.
From its long standing, and the thoroughness

226 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

with which it has been studied, as well as
from the extraordinary nature of the pheno-
mena, Mrs. Piper's case derives a peculiar
interest and importance. It differs from
those of the other automatists mentioned
in the circumstance that her writing is done
during a trance, whereas theirs is produced
almost invariably without even a momentary
loss of consciousness, though signs are not
wanting that the trance-state, if encouraged,
might readily supervene.

Mrs. Piper's trance-communications used
formerly to be made by word of mouth,
while she was " controlled," or possessed, by
what claimed to be the spirit of a Franco-
American doctor named Phinuit, a life-like and
vivacious character, whom we cannot easily
imagine to be, as some people have suspected,
nothing more substantial than a secondary
personality of Mrs. Piper herself. Be this as
it may, however, many sitters have received
through him what they felt justified in accept-
ing as proofs of the continued existence of
their departed friends. Nowadays Mrs. Piper
writes instead of speaking, while she lies
entranced, but her sitters talk to the writing
hand, which replies in script, and these
strangely conducted conversations have
yielded much first-rate evidence. They pro-
fess to be presided over by the band of soi-
disant spirits who were formerly known as the
" guides " of Stainton Moses, and who have
superseded Phinuit, importing a somewhat
perplexing element into the case, though the

AUTOMATIC WRITING 227

change has been on the whole decidedly for
the better. It is, for instance, startling at
first to learn that on one occasion two of
them claimed to be respectively Homer and
Ulysses, and often in the company of Tele-
machus, while they all persistently comport
themselves with ostentatious solemnity, dis-
coursing in what Professor William James
called " sacerdotal verbiage," mixed incon-
gruously with slangy colloquialisms.

Absurdities and inconsistencies such as
these, however, belong merely to the trance's
visionary setting or framework, which fits
it naturally enough, since it certainly comes
from somewhere in the region of dreams,
that mysterious borderland lying unexplored
between two worlds. And like in origin, no
doubt, is the fantastic streak which so
frequently runs through other automatic
writings. Mrs. Verrall, for example, refers
to " the few words of nonsense — sheer and
absolute nonsense — which often seem re-
quisite before the script can get under
way."

Through the above-mentioned group of
automatists it is that the recent very remark-
able evidence bearing on the continued
existence of human life after bodily death
has for the most part been received, in mes-
sages which purport to come from Henry
Sidgwick and Frederic Myers, together with
their friends and fellow-workers Edmund
Gurney and Richard Hodgson, who departed
this life in 1888 and 1905. In the evidence

H 2

228 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

thus obtained, the new and noteworthy
feature is what the investigators of the
phenomena have called cross-correspondence,
the beginning of which, a complicated bit of
history, we can only briefly outline here,
referring the reader for details to the very
full account given in the Proceedings of the
Society for Psychical Research, vols. xx.-xxv.
It has not infrequently happened that
references to the same topic have appeared
simultaneously in the script of two automatic
writers, a fact which might be — and therefore,
in weighing evidence of this kind, is provision-
ally— accounted for by thought-transference
between them, even though they were on
some occasions as far apart as England and
India. But in 1906 Miss Johnson, an official
of the Society, studying the scripts of Mrs.
Verrall and Mrs. Holland, saw traces c>f
attempts on the part of a control to produce
a more complex sort of coincidence, by caus-
ing a single statement to appear in two
scripts, divided into fragments, unmeaning
until put together, thus making telepathy
seem a less adequate explanation. The group
of controls, including Frederic Myers, by whom
these scripts appear to be inspired, manifested
themselves also in the trance-writings of
Mrs. Piper, who at this time came from her
home in Boston, Massachusetts, on a visit to
England; and with a view to encouraging
the production of even more elaborate and
complex cross-correspondences, the following
experiment was planned by members of the

AUTOMATIC WRITING 229

Society : A message, addressed to Frederic
Myers, was written in Latin, and ostensibly
communicated to him through the entranced
Mrs. Piper, who has no knowledge of any
ancient language. Its last clause ran : " Try
to give to A and B [i. e. any two automat is ts]
two different messages, between which no
connection is discernible. Then as soon as
possible give to C [a third automatist] a third
message, which will reveal the hidden
connection."

In so far as the experiment had been
designed to test the survival of classical
scholarship, it proved a partial failure, for
only a small portion of the message was ever
actually translated by Mrs. Piper's control.
But an answer immediately sent through
other automatists seemed to imply an appre-
hension of its object on the part of the soi-
disant Frederic Myers, and it has led to a
series of cross-correspondences, conforming to
the type suggested, and successfully carried
out with an ingenuity which in some cases
draws upon stores of knowledge not possessed
by the automatic writers through whom the
messages are sent. It is a significant fact
that evidence of this kind, the desirability
of which had been pointed out by Frederic
Myers in his earthly life, has begun to appear
since his passing over, and not only so but
the initiation of it apparently came from
his side.

Considered from an evidential point of
view, these complex cross-correspondences, if

230 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

their assumed meaning be confirmed, have
a value which can hardly be over-estimated.
They are so contrived that they seem to
exclude the explanation by that telepathy
from the living which a psychical researcher
might appropriately describe as the " source
of all my bliss and all my woe"; but while
increasing the antecedent probability of sur-
vival, conclusive proof of the fact, in any given
instance, is made almost impossible, for the
present, at least, when our ignorance can set
no limits to the scope of telepathic powers.

Furthermore, in her very interesting Report
on Mrs. Holland's automatic writing (S.P.R.
Proceedings, vol. xxi.), Miss Alice Johnson
says, with reference to a view held by Dr.
Leaf, that the evidence on the subject in-
dicates a gradual disintegration of the spirit
after death, on the analogy of the body's
decay : "I venture to think that some of
the evidence obtained since Dr. Leaf wrote
[four or five years earlier] has a certain bear-
ing on this argument. In these cross-corre-.
spondences, we find apparently telepathy
relating to the present — that is, the corre-
sponding statements are approximately con-
temporaneous— and to events in the present,
which, to all intents and purposes, are un-
known to any living person, since the meaning
and point of her script is often uncompre-
hended by each automatist, until the solution
is found by putting the two scripts together.
At the same time we have proof of what
has occurred in the scripts themselves. Thus

AUTOMATIC WRITING 231

it seems as if this method is directed towards
satisfying our evidential requirements.

" There is no doubt that the cross-corre-
spondences are a characteristic element in
the scripts of Mrs. Verrall, Mrs. Forbes, Mrs.
Holland, and still more recently, Mrs. Piper.
And the important point is that the element
is a new one. We have reason to believe
. . . that the idea of making a statement
in one script complementary of a statement in
another had not occurred to Mr. Myers in
his lifetime. . . . Neither did those who
have been investigating automatic script
since his death invent the plan, if plan there
be. It was not the automatists who de-
tected it, but a student of the scripts (Miss
Alice Johnson); and it has every appearance
of being an element imported from outside :
it suggests an independent invention, an
active intelligence constantly at work in the
present, not a mere echo or remnant of
individualities of the past."

The earliest of the cross-correspondences
recorded between the automatic scripts of
Mrs. Verrall and Mrs. Holland began towards
the end of 1903, when the former was in
Algeria and the latter in India. Several
minor points of resemblance occur during
this period in their scripts, and both of them
refer to the approaching third anniversary
of Mr. Myers' death, January 17, 1904. On
that day they both wrote automatically, the
script purporting to come from Mr. Myers,
and each mentions a sealed envelope and a

232 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

text. Mrs. Verrall wrote : " The question is
answered . . . The text and answer are one, and
are given ; " and though the text actually
given by Mrs. Holland was not this answer, it
was one which had a special significance for
Mrs. Verrall and Mr. Myers. Mrs. Holland
wrote : "I am unable to make your hand
form Greek characters, and so I cannot give
the text as I wish, only the reference : 1 Cor.
xvi. 13." This text is : "Watch ye; stand
fast in the faith, quit you like men, be
strong." " It is," Miss Alice Johnson writes
(S.P.R. Proceedings, Part LV.), "the text
inscribed, omitting the two last words, in
Greek, over the gateway of Selwyn College,
Cambridge, which would be passed in going
from Mr. Myers' house to Mrs. VerralPs, or
to the rooms in Newnham College where
Professor and Mrs. Sidgwick lived. . . . The
Greek inscription has an error in it — the
omission of a mute letter — on which Mr.
Myers had more than once remarked to Mrs.
Verrall." But Mrs. Holland, who has never
been in Cambridge, did not know that any
such inscription existed, and was quite
unaware that the text had any significance
for Mrs. Verrall and her friends.

Mrs. Holland's script of January 17, 1904,
concluded with a message apparently ad-
dressed to Sir Oliver Lodge, an old friend of
Mr. Myers : " Dear old chap, you have done
so much in the past three years — I am cog-
nizant of a great deal of it, but with strange
gaps in my knowledge. . . . There's so much to

AUTOMATIC WRITING 233

be learnt from the Diamond Island experi-
ment . . ." This refers to Diamond Island
at the mouth of the Irrawaddy in Burma,
where wireless telegraphy experiments, on the
Lodge-Muirhead system, were then in progress.
"The script," Miss Johnson writes (S.P.R.
Proceedings, Part LXIIL), " is remarkably ap-
propriate in several respects as a message to
Sir Oliver Lodge. It was written on the third
anniversary of Mr. Myers' death, which was
also the end of Sir Oliver Lodge's three years*
presidency of the S.P.R. I take the phrase —
4 you have done so much in the past three
years ' — to refer to this. The tone of affec-
tionate intimacy running through the whole
script is also especially appropriate. ... It is
further significant that, as Sir Oliver Lodge
tells me, Mr. Myers had been keenly interested
in his work in wireless telegraphy ; and it was
while with Mr. Myers, and stimulated by him,
that he devised the fundamental plan for
' tuning,' which in some form or another is
necessarily used in all systems of wireless
telegraphy, and was first patented by him in
1897. The term ' syntony ' was invented
for him by Mr. Myers and Dr. A. T. Myers. . . .
While the script is thus thoroughly character-
istic of the relation between Mr. Myers and
Sir Oliver Lodge, the fact that it is connected
in point of time with the first important cross-
correspondence between Mrs. Holland and
Mrs. Verrall— the ' Selwyn Text Incident '—
seems to lend weight to the supposition that
yhat we may call the ' Diamond Island

234 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

script' may have been at least partially
inspired by Mr. Myers."

Mrs. Holland is doubtful whether at the
time she wrote this script she knew that these
experiments were being made; but she
certainly knew nothing of the details, nor
about the other circumstances, which gave
appropriateness to the message. Neither
the cross-correspondence nor the message to
Sir Oliver Lodge was recognized by the
readers of the .script for some years after
they were written, and the " control " in the
meanwhile expressed much disappointment at
his failure to make himself understood.

On January 28, 1902, Dr. Hodgson had a
sitting with Mrs. Piper in Boston, Massachu-
setts, and when she was in the trance, sug-
gested that her control should try to impress
Miss Verrall at Cambridge in England with
a certain scene or object. This being assented
to, Dr. Hodgson said : " Can you try to make
Miss Verrall see you holding a spear in your
hand ? " The control answered : " Why a
sphere?" Dr. Hodgson repeated "spear";
this was understood by the control, and the
experiment promised during the week. At
the next sitting, on February 4, the experi-
ment with the sphear — so spelt in the trance
script — was said to have been made with
success. The confusion between " spear "
and " sphere " evidently persisted in the mind
of the medium, and the combination " sphear "
resulted.

Now, on January 31, 1902, intermediate,

AUTOMATIC WRITING 235

therefore, between these two sittings with Mrs.
Piper in Boston, Mrs. Verrall suddenly felt
impelled to write automatically whilst she was
in London, and the script which resulted
(written partly in Greek and partly in Latin)
was interpreted by Mrs. Verrall at the
time to mean : " the seeing of a sphere
effected a mysterious 'co-reception,'" and
the script associated this statement with the
words volatile ferrum (flying iron) which Virgil
uses to signify " spear." Mrs. Verrall states
that in no previous automatic writing of hers
had there been any reference to a spear, and
the word " sphere " only once occurred some
time before, in some very unintelligible
script. Further, her writing in London on
January 31 was signed with a Greek cross,
which makes the connection between Mrs.
VerralPs script and Mrs. Piper's still more
striking, as the " control " then operating
through Mrs. Piper always signed himself with
a similar Greek cross.

Here, quite apart from the good faith of
Dr. Hodgson and Mrs. Verrall, we have the
written record made on the two sides of the
Atlantic. Dr. Hodgson, in fact, forwarded
the report of this American sitting with
suggested experiments to Mrs. Verrall, and
it was received by her on February 13 — a
fortnight after Mrs. Verrall had been controlled
to write the sentence quoted. Mrs. Piper's
controls, it may be observed, have a tendency
not to distinguish between the scripts of Mrs.
Verrall and her daughter.

CHAPTER XVI
AUTOMATIC WRITING (continued). SURVIVAL

AFTER DEATH

INVALUABLE though it is, were no evidence
forthcoming other than such mosaics of
messages, with their cryptic language and
allusions studiously veiled, until the disclosure
of some missing word or phrase shall piece
them together into an intelligible whole, we
might indeed receive a discouraging and
utterly erroneous impression that the manu-
facture of puzzles and enigmas is the sole
faculty and employment of discarnate spirits.
But we have, of course, much other evidence,
which, though attaining less completely to
the rigorous standard demanded by Psychical
Research — is quite strong enough to be
considered by many unimpeachable, except on
the hypothesis of terrene telepathy pushed to
its very farthest limits.

This evidence forms a most useful, in fact
an indispensable supplement to that which
aims primarily at elaborating conclusive
proofs. It is given in communications of
various kinds, professing to come from some
discarnate spirit, and by their characteristic
matter and manner creating an impression
230

AUTOMATIC WRITING 237

that they really do so. The well-authenticated
cases of such communications that have
occurred during the last few years are far too
numerous for recital here, even in the form
of the barest catalogue. If we consider only
the one particular little group of friends and
colleagues who have so swiftly reassembled
on the other side, we find instances many and
impressive. Those who, like the present
writer, were intimate with them have recog-
nized repeatedly the familiar traits, material
and trivial, habits of thought, and tricks of
speech, that betoken a personality, or its vrai-
semblance still existing, though contending
with obstacles which forbid more than an
incomplete expression. Such changes as are
noted might spring naturally from the changed
conditions of the communicators. Thus we
learn that Frederic Myers has lost nothing
of his intense concern about his comrades on
their homeward way, but that what he now
most eagerly desires is to assure them how
" immortality, instead of being a beautiful
dream, is the one, the only reality, the strong
golden thread on which all the illusions of
all the lives are strung." And, again, that
Henry Sidgwick retains his propensity for
awaiting results with scrupulous patience,
though he has now, as well he may, added to
patience a confident hope. A short account
may be given here of an incident from which
this appears, the rather as it involves two
cross-correspondences of a not unmanageably
complicated type.

238 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

In Cambridge on February 9, 1906, Mrs.
Verrall's automatic writing informed her that
in Professor Henry Sidgwick's Memoir, which
was shortly to be published, she would find
two clues to the meaning of certain passages
in her earlier script. The Memoir was pub-
lished on February 27, and on the following
day she found one of these clues, but noticed
some inconsistencies whence she inferred a
mistake in the passage concerned, the writer
of which had purported to be Professor Sidg-
wick. She at once mentioned this to Mrs.
Sidgwick, and at the same time Mrs. Holland,
away in the country, and unaware of what had
happened, wrote automatically : " Henry (i. e.
Professor Sidgwick) was not mistaken."

Soon afterwards Mrs. Verrall found the
second clue in a letter from Henry Sidgwick
on the subject of immortality, in which he
says : " On moral grounds, hope rather than
certainty is fit for us in this earthly existence."
The letter was addressed to his friend, Roden
Noel, with whom neither Mrs. Verrall nor
Mrs. Holland had been acquainted. Yet in
her next automatic script, a few days after-
wards, Mrs. Holland wrote, under the " con-
trol " of Henry Sidgwick, the date of Roden
Noel's death, twelve years before, and added
the following passage, in which the senti-
ments strongly resemble, with some appro-
priate modifications, those of the letter to
him wherein Mrs. Verrall had just found her
clue : " We no more solve the riddle of death
by dying than we solve the problem of life

AUTOMATIC WRITING 239

by being born. Take my own case — I was
always a seeker, until it seemed to me at
times as if the quest was more to me than the
prize. Only the attainments of my search
were generally like rainbow gold, always
beyond and afar. It is not all clear; I seek
still, only with a confirmed optimism more
perfect and beautiful than any we imagined
before. I am not oppressed with the desire
that animates some of us to share our knowledge
or optimism with you all before the time. You
know who feels like that ; but I am content that
you should wait. The solution of the Great
Problem I could not give you — I am still very
far away from it. And the abiding knowledge
of the inherent truth and beauty into which
all the inevitable uglinesses of existence finally
resolve themselves will be yours in due time."

Moreover, at this time Mrs. VerralPs as well
as Mrs. Holland's script produced appropriate
references to Roden Noel and his poems,
while each almost simultaneously wrote a
description of the, to them, unknown poet
which intimate friends of his pronounced to be
very characteristic.

Much has been said by these controls about
the difficulties which beset them in their
endeavours to communicate; and we may
ourselves reasonably infer and conjecture
much more, without supposing that we have
by any means fully realized the magnitude
of the obstacles which they encounter, or
even, in many respects, the nature of them.
Amongst those which lie to some extent

240 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

within the ken of our imagination, the most
formidable may perhaps be: (1) the impossi-
bility of securing the complete passivity of the
mind of the medium whom the communicator
is using as an instrument, and therefore of
excluding its influence on the working of his
own ; (2) the all but total impossibility of tran-
scending the limits imposed by the medium's
mental apparatus and intellectual equipment.

The effects of this first difficulty are obvious
to anybody who studies the phenomena
occurring in different automatists under what
is, or purports to be, the same control, and
an exceptionally favourable opportunity for
making such observations is afforded by the
above-mentioned allied group of automatists
and controls. If the variations noticeable,
from medium to medium, in each control-
ling spirit were eliminated, leaving only the
features common to all its manifestations,
we should no doubt discover that the charac-
teristics which it had really possessed in earth-
life formed this residuum. But the emerging
personality would often seem a thing of shreds
and patches, so closely had it been interwoven
with that of the medium through which it
made its way. For, as Sir Oliver Lodge
remarks : '' The process of communication
is sophisticated by many influences, so that it
is very difficult, perhaps at present impossible,
to disentangle and exhibit clearly the part
that each plays,"

This difficulty is a difficulty indeed. In the
case of an entranced medium, whose spirit

AUTOMATIC WRITING 241

is supposed to withdraw temporarily from
the organism, of which another spirit takes
possession, the situation has some resemblance
to that of a stream, with its main current
deflected, and another stream turned into its
channel. The new stream will of course be
bounded by the old channel, and its waters
tinged by the pools which lie in its bed, and
the deposits over which it flows. But when
the medium is not entranced, the analogy
points rather to those fresh-water springs
which sometimes rise in the sea. Here the
separateness of the waters is generally sure
to be far more transient and less complete.
Only when the spring wells up with unwonted
force and copiousness does it reach the surface
free from briny admixture. And, in fact,
something about the manner in which the
more characteristic of the communications
often come, does suggest a sudden uprush of
this kind through an always resisting and
encroaching element.

Then, as for the second great difficulty
which confronts the communicator, entailed
upon him by the limitations of the automatist,
we may imagine some faint resemblance
between his plight and that of a writer
constrained to compose an abstruse treatise in
words of three letters, or in those occurring
on some chance scrap of print. The smaller
and sillier the scrap, the more fatal will he
find his restrictions, just as the control's
power of expressing himself is diminished
by the illiteracy and unintelligence of the

242 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

medium. We must allow likewise for the
possibility, if not probability, of other still
more baffling impediments, unimaginable by
us in our ignorance of what the conditions
are in the spirit-world. Thus, there is reason
to believe that an intelligent communicator
is sometimes, when communicating, in a more
or less dazed and drowsy condition, which
gives his message the character merely of a
fantastic dream.

Curious glimpses, by the way, may some-
times be gained from the confused and in-
coherent, but often very interesting utter-
ances of Mrs. Piper, as she begins to waken
half-dazed from her trance. She always
represents herself as returning most reluct-
antly from surroundings compared with which
her earthly abode appears dark and dismal,
and shared by inhabitants who are decidedly
unprepossessing. They seem to her, she says,
like black people. On one occasion, indeed,
she addressed her sitters with a quaint and
uncompromising frankness : "I don't want
you — I want the other place — you look
funny. . . . You are ugly, to say the least.
I never ! I wouldn't look like you. . . . Are
you alive?" she added; "there are others
more alive than you are up there." More
significantly, she often speaks of being sur-
rounded on her departure by those who are
endeavouring to communicate with this
world, and who seize the opportunity of
impressing upon her some brief message,
which she has at times been able to deliver,

AUTOMATIC WRITING 243

as a valuable bit of evidence, before the
fleeting recollection of her trance-experiences
has faded.

Dr. Hodgson began his investigation of
Mrs. Piper's trance-utterances as a thorough
sceptic, but after many years of unremitting
and critical investigation, testing one hypo-
thesis after another, he was finally driven
to the conclusion " that the chief ' com-
municators ' are veritably the personalities
that they claim to be, and that they have
survived the change we call death." Though
some of us may be unable fully to share
Dr. Hodgson's conviction, we must remember
that his experience and knowledge was larger
than ours, and at any rate we may dismiss the
futile criticism of those who have not spent
as many minutes as he spent years in the
study of this subject. Dr. Hodgson's opinion,
it may be added, is now shared by many
other able inquirers, who have made a search-
ing and impartial investigation of the evidence
which has accumulated since his death.

Moreover, when appraising the most recent
testimony in favour of life after death, we
should remember that the evidence is being
constantly strengthened, not by accumula-
tion merely, but by increased cogency and
purposefulness. If we review the past ten
years, we cannot fail to be struck by the
steadily growing clearness of attempts on
the part of those who have passed over to
improve and multiply methods of communi-
cation. These efforts are seconded on our

244 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

side with admirable industry, patience and
tact, alike by automatists and students of
psychical phenomena, and the results come
daily to light. At the present time, the
Society for Psychical Research has just pub-
lished the details of some very remarkable
incidents which took place in the course of
1910. Writing of these, Sir Oliver Lodge
says : " He [the scientific explorer] feels
secure and happy in his advance only when
one and the same hypothesis will account
for everything — both old and new — which
he encounters. The one hypothesis which
seems to me most nearly to satisfy that con-
dition in this case, is that we are in indirect
touch with some part of the surviving person-
ality of a scholar, and that scholar F. W. H.
Myers."

All things considered, it seems a not wholly
extravagant conjecture that another ten years
may put us in possession of more knowledge
about the means whereby these supernormal
messages are conveyed to us, and therefore
in more favourable circumstances for re-
ceiving them. Hitherto our experiences on
the subject have certainly tended to correct
the popular notion of a ghost as a being
whose coming and going is very much a matter
of its own casual caprice, barred by nothing,
except, perhaps, some form of exorcism. And
they have heightened our appreciation of the
insight shown by Wordsworth in making his
afflicted Margaret say —

AUTOMATIC WRITING 245

<e I look for ghosts , but none will force
Their way to me,"

little disposed as we may be to draw her
despairing conclusion —

"'Tis falsely said
That there was ever intercourse
Between the living and the dead.*'

Certainly, for our own part, we believe
there is some active intelligence at work
behind, and apart from, the automatist, an
intelligence which is more like the deceased
person it professes to be than that of any
other we can imagine. And though the
intelligence is provokingly irritating in the
way it evades simple direct replies to questions,
yet it is difficult to find any other solution to
the problem of these scripts and cross-corre-
spondences than that there is an attempt at
intelligent co-operation between certain dis-
embodied minds and our own.

But does the evidence afford us proof of
immortality ? Obviously it cannot ; nor can
any investigations yield scientific proof of
that larger, higher, and enduring life which
we desire and mean by immortality. Some
of the evidence, indeed, seems rather to indi-
cate a more or less truncated personality, a
fragment of earthly memories, partly roused
by, and mainly connected with, those through
and to whom the communications come; to
picture, in fact, a dim, wraith-like survival
such as that imagined by Homer when he
made Achilles in the underworld declare that
he would rather serve as a hireling among the

246 PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

living than reign a king among the dead.
The intelligent and characteristic messages,
however, suggest that the vague ones are
due to the fading and dissolving of earthly
memories and ties, as the departed become
more absorbed in their new life, the very
nature of which we are in our present state
incapable of conceiving. Our own limitations,
in fact, make it impossible for the evidence
to convey the assurance that we are communi-
cating with what is best and noblest in those
who have passed into the unseen.

In fine, psychical research, though it may
strengthen the foundations, cannot take the
place of religion, using iri its widest sense that
much-abused word. For, after all, it deals
with the external, though it be in an unseen
world ; and its chief value lies in the fulfil-
ment of its work, whereby it reveals to us
the inadequacy of the external, either here
or hereafter, to satisfy the life of the soul.
The psychical order is not the spiritual order,
but a stepping-stone in the ascent of the soul
to its own self-apprehension, its conscious
sharing in the eternal divine life, of which
Frederic Myers thus foretells —

" And from thee, o'er some lucid ocean-rim,
The phantom Past shall as a shadow flee ;
And thou be in the Spirit, and everything
Born in the God that shall be born in thee."

NOTE. — It is desirable to mention that the
Society for Psychical Research (referred to
as the S.P.R. in the foregoing pages) has no
collective opinion for or against the existence
of the supernormal phenomena discussed in
this little book. In fact the Council of that
Society welcomes the severest instructive
criticism of the evidence adduced in any of its
publications. As Mr. Andrew Lang pointed
out in his recent Presidential address : " The
Society, as such, has no views, no beliefs, no
hypotheses, except, perhaps, the opinion that
there is an open field of inquiry; that not all
the faculties and potentialities of man have
been studied and explained up to date, in
terms of nerve and brain."

The Presidents of the Society have been as
follows : — Professor Henry Sidgwick, D.C.L.,
Litt.D.; Professor Balfour Stewart, LL.D.,
F.R.S. ; Right Hon. A. J. Balfour, M.P., D.C.L.,
F.R.S. ; Professor W. James, of Harvard,
U.S.A. ; Sir W. Crookes, O.M., D.Sc., F.R.S. ;
Mr. F. W. H. Myers, late Fellow Trin. Coll.,
Camb. ; Sir Oliver Lodge, D.Sc., LL.D., F.R.S. ;
Professor W. F. Barrett, F.R.S.; Professor
C. Richet, M.D. (of Paris) ; Right Hon.
Gerald W. Balfour, late Fellow Trin. Coll.,
Camb.; Mrs. H. Sidgwick, D.Litt., LL.D.;
Mr. H. A. Smith; Hon. Treasurer S.P.R.,
Mr. Andrew Lang, M.A., LL.D.

247

BIBLIOGRAPHY

So numerous are the books and papers which have been
published at home and abroad on the subject matter of this
book, that only a very brief outline can be given of some of
the modern and more instructive English books dealing with
psychical research.

An extensive and valuable collection of English and
foreign works on psychical research will be found in the
Edmund Gurney Library, in the rooms of the Society for
Physical Research.

Students will find in the publications of the Society for
Psychical Research a wealth of information upon, as well ajv
a critical examination of, alleged supernormal phenomena.
These publications can be obtained from the rooms of the
Society, 20, Hanover Square, London, W. Among them
are: —

Proceedings of the S.P.K., Vols. I to XXV (1882-1911).
Journal of the S.P.R., Vols. I to XIV (1884-1911).

The journal is only issued to members and associates of
the Society.

Phantasms of the Living, 2 vols., by E. GUBNEY, F. W. H.
MYERS and F. PODMOEE.

Proceedings of the American S.P.R., Vols. I to VI.
Journal of the American S.P.K., Vols. I. to V.
Combined Index to the above down to the year 1900.

Human Personality, 2 vols., by F. W. H. MYERS, late Fellow

of Trin. Coll. , Camb. (Longmans & Co. ).
An abridgment in one volume by Mr. Leo Myers has also
been published. This magnum opus contains the substance
of the Society's investigations down to the time of the
author's death in January 1901, and is the standard text-book
on psychical research.

249

250 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Science and a Future Life, by F. W. H. MYERS (Longmanr

& Co.).
A suggestive and eloquent essay.

A Modern Priestess of Isis, by V. S. SOLOVYOFF, abridged
and translated from the Russian by WALTER LEAF,
Litt.D. (Longmans & Co.).

This translation was made on behalf of the S.P.R. by Dr.
Leaf, to whom a grateful acknowledgment is made in a
prefatory note by Prof. H. Sidgwick. The book is an
entertaining and valuable supplement to the exposure of the
claims made by Madame Blavatsky, the result of an in-
vestigation undertaken for the S.P.R. by Dr. Hodgson.
Prof. Sidgwick writes, "Mr. SolovyoflPs vivid description of
the mingled qualities of her [Mme. Blavatsky's] nature — •
her supple craft and reckless audacity, her intellectual vigour
and elastic vitality, her genuine bonhomie, affectionatenesa
and (on occasions) persuasive pathos," afford some explana-
tion of the remarkable success of her imposture and also
furnish a most interesting psychological study.

Personality and Telepathy, by F. C. CONSTABLE, M.A. (Kegan
Paul, Trench & Co.).

A work recently published, based on Kant's philosophy
and advocating the view that telepathy is inexplicable except
on the assumption that human personality is a partial and
mediate manifestation in this world of a spiritual 01
intuitive self.

Hypnotism and Suggestion, 5th ed., by C. LLOYD TUOKEY,
M.D. (Balliere & Co.).

This is a standard medical work on psycho-therapeutics
or treatment by hypnotism and suggestion, and records
numerous cases in the author's practice.

Hypnotism: its History, Practice, and Theory ', by MILNE
BRAMWELL, M.D. (Grant Richards).

Also a standard work of great value.

The Influence of the Mind upon the Body, by D. HACK TUKE,
M.D. (Churchill & Co.).

A classical and early work on this important subject ; noV r
so widely recognized in psycho-therapeutic treatment.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 251

The Survival of Man, by SIR OLIVER LODGE (Methuen & Co.).

An outline of the author's investigations on psychical
research, more especially with regard to automatic writing
and contemporary records, which have convinced him that
trustworthy evidence exists on behalf of human survival of
bodily death.

On the Threshold of a New World of Thought, by W. F.
BARRETT (Kegan Paul, Trench & Co.).

A new and revised edition is in preparation.

The author points out the many far-reaching implications
involved in the acceptance of telepathy, and discusses the
question of spiritualism from a scientific and religious point
of view.

Mors Janua Vitas, by H. A. DALLAS, with an introduction by
PROF. BARRETT (W. Rider & Son).

The object of this book is to present a summary of the
recent evidence for survival, so far as it relates to Mr.
F. W. H. Myers. It is written in a thoughtful and reverent
spirit.

Modern Spiritualism: a History and a Criticism, by
F. PODMORE, 2 vols. (Methuen & Co.).

An important and able contribution to this subject from
an agnostic point of view.

Apparitions and Thought Transference, by the same Author.
Contemporary Science Series (Walter Scott & Co. ).

A summary and discussion of the evidence on behalf of
telepathy and visual hallucinations.

Mesmerism and Christian Science^ by th« same Author
(Methuen & Co.).

An excellent account of the history of mesmerism and its
phenomena, together with a discussion of the development of
mental healing in the United States.

Cock Lane and Common Sense, by ANDREW LANG, M.A.,
LL.D. (Longmans & Co.).

Contains valuable chapters on comparative psychical
research and the ghost-theory of the origin of religions.
Mr. Lang shows how each antagonist calmly ignores
everything which does not fit in with his own theory.

252 BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Making of Religion, by the same Author (Longmans
& Co.).

A volume with appendices full of interest to students of
psychical research. The author compares primitive and
savage beliefs in the existence of many supernormal phe-
nomena with modern evidence of the same, and shows the
need of modifying current anthropological and religious
theories in the light of modern knowledge.

Among older works of interest may be mentioned the
brilliant preface written by Professor A. De Morgan to his
wife's book, entitled From Matter to Spirit ; also The Truths
contained in Popular Superstitions, by H. Mayo, M.D., F.R.S.,
etc., a series of letters showing a courageous and original
thinker.

INDEX

Adventure, An, book so called, 200

Antoinette. Marie, hallucinations
of, 201

Apparitions, 119-129 ; see Halluci-
nations

Automatic writing, 219 et seq.

Autoscopcs, definition and various
forms of, 28

Aymar, Jacques, 172

Baguette Divinatoire, 26

Bertrand, Dr. A., on somnam-
bulism, 86

Bishop, Mr. I., experiments with,
46-48

Braid, Dr., hypnotic experiments,
88

Bramwell, Dr. Milne, hypnotic
experiments,. 91

Calculating boys, 37

Census of hallucinations, 116

Clairvoyance, telepathic, 140

in crystal-gazing, 147
travelling, 158
Swedenborg's, 154
during hypnotic

trance, 156-159
in normal state, 160
of Rev. C. Sanders,

161-165
Coincidences, study of, 115
Community of sensation, 65, 70, 77
Creery, experiments with the

Misses, 53-63
Crookes, Sir W., investigations by,

216

Cross-correspondence, 228
Crystal-gazing, 141

Divining-rod, so called- 26, 167
etseq.

Debbie, Mr., experiments with

clairvoyants, 159
Dowsing, history of, 168

„ for mineral lodes, 169
„ for water, 170 et seq.
„ origin of wood, 170
„ nature of faculty, 182
Dreams, lost articles found
through dreams,
134-137
„ revival of memory in,

„ apparent clairvoyance

in, 139

Bdgeworth, Prof., calculations by,

59

Blliotson, Dr., and mesmerism, 87
Esdaile, Dr., painless operations

under mesmerism, 87

Flournoy, Prof., book on secondary

personality, 201
Fraud in spiritualistic mediums,

212

Ghosts, see Hallucinations
Gurney, Edmund, 33, 114

„ experiments by, 77, 113
„ census of hallucinations,

116

Guthrie, Malcolm, experiments on
thought-transference, 65-68

Hallucinations, types of, 111

„ veridical or truth-

telling, 112
„ census of, 116

visual cases of, 118-

122

„ auditory, 123, 131

„ in crystal-gazing,

IMetteq.

253

254

INDEX

Ilauntings, remarkable cases of,

189, 195

„ other cases of, 193, 194

theories to account

for, 199

„ illusory cases, 201

Herdman, Prof., experiments on

thought-transference, 65
Hodgson, Dr., experiments by, 214
„ result of investiga-
tions of Mrs.
Piper, 242
Holland, Mrs., automatic writing,

230-233
Home, D. D., phenomena obtained

through, 216, 217
Human Personality, Mr. Myers,
work on, 32

,, „ nature of, 35

Hypnotism, therapeutic effects of,

,, appreciation of time,

91
„ hallucinations evoked

by, 95
Hyslop, Prof., experiments, by, 22

Joan of Arc, voices of, 220
Johnson, Miss A., experiments by,

80

„ , discovery of cross-

correspondence,
228, 231

Lang, Andrew, case of crystal-
gazing investi-
gated by, 145

„ ,, on widespread

belief in clair-
voyance, 153

Lodge, Sir Oliver, experiments by,

66

„ „ opinion of, on

survival, 244

Medium, in physical and psychical
phenomena, 40, 212

Memory, revival of, in dreams,
134-137

Mesmerism, history of, 83

, , phenomena associated

with, 86

Miles, Miss, experiments on tele-
pathy, 97 et grq.

Mitchell, Dr.. hypnotic experi-
ment- liy, 92

Moses, Rev. W. 8., visual halluci-
nation of, 222

.» ), i> automatic writ-
ing by. 228-
225

Motor-automatism, definition of.

Muscle-reading, 47

Myers, F. W. H., on human person-
ality, 32

„ „ messages claiming

to come from,

Paquet, Mrs., a vision seen by, 126
Pendulum, magic, or pendule

explorateur, 20-27
„ explanation of, 21

„ paper on, in PhiU

Trans., 24
Phantasms of the Living, book on,

114

„ cases of, 113, 128, 203
„ of the dead, 119, 121,

124-131
Piper, Mrs., trance communica>

tions, 226, 229
Poltergeists, meaning of term, 20! >

„ cases of, 206-209

Psychical Research Society, aim»

of, 84

»» >, range of, 10

«t „ eminent

adherent I
of, 41
,, „ foundation

of, 55

„ „ presidents

of, 247

Radnor, Lady, case recorded by,

Ramsden, Miss, experiments on

telepathy, 97-103
Religion and psychical research,

Rich'et, Prof. 0., case attested by,

152
Romanes, G. J., experiments by,

46-49

Second sight, 154

Sidgwick,Prof. H., experiments on
thought-trans-
ference, 79, 80

ii ,, quotation from

addreM by, 62

INDEX

255

Sidgwick. Prof. H., presidency of
S.P.R., 33, 247
„ „ census of hallu-

cinations, 116

„ Mrs. H., president and
lion. sec.
S.P.R., 33

„ ,, discussion of

case by, 126
„ on haunted
houses, 195

_j, revival of memory in, 134
,," perception in, 138
Sleeping preacher, the, 161
Socrates, demon of, 220
Somnambulism, 86
Spiritualistic phenomena dis-
cussed, 211, 214
„ mediums, 212

Subliminal self, 23, 34-40
Suggestion, influence of, 85, 88-90

„ post-hypnotic, 95

Supernatural, use and abuse of

term, 11-13

Superstition, definition of, 15
Supraliminal, self -definition of, 39
Survival of bodily death, evidence

for, 242-246

Swedenborg, cases of clairvoyance,
154

Telepathy, definition of, 68
„ implications of, 69
„ evidence for cumula-
tive, 107

Telepathy, over long distances.

96-107

„ how propagated, un-
known, 107

Telsesthesia, definition of, 186
Telegnosis, definition of, 161
Telekinetic phenomena, definition

of, 214

Telepathic clairvoyance, 140
Teresa, St. , and dowsing, 171
Thought-reading, so-called, 44 et

seq.

Thought-transference in normal
state, 54
et seq.

„ „ in hypnotic

state, 70
et seq.

„ „ see Telepathy

Time, appreciation of, in hypnotic

trance, 91

Towns, apparition of Captain, 128
Trance communications, difficul-
ties of, 240

Unconscious muscular action, 21
et seq.

Visions, tee Hallucination

Wesley, Rev. S., and haunting, 207

Willing game, 44

Writing, automatic, 220 et seq.

Zahoris, the, 185
Zancigs, the, 50
Zoist, the, 87, 157

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and commercial development of the Central and South America
republics.

76. The Ocean. A General Account of the Sci
ence of the Sea.

By SIR JOHN MURRAY, K. C. B., Naturalist H. M. S. "Challenger,
1872-1876, joint author of The Depths of the Ocean, etc.

86. Exploration of the Alps.

By ARNOLD LUNN, M. A. A record of the exploits of the first feat
some travellers in Switzerland, the pioneers of scientific exploratior
the conditions of present-day climbing and the records of all thes
things in ancient and modern literature.

72. Germany of To-day.

By CHARLES TOWER. Describes the constitution and government o
the Empire and its several States, city administration and enterprise
educational institutions, the organization of industry and agriou!
ture, and the outstanding features of social and intellectual activity

57. Napoleon.

By HERBERT FISHER, Vice-Chancellor of Sheffield University. Autho
of The Republican Tradition in Europe, etc. Mr. Fisher presents a
once a vivid portrait of the "greatest conqueror and captain of mod
ern times," and an important historical estimate of the period.

26. The Dawn of History.

By J. L. MYRES, Professor of Ancient History, Oxford.

30. Rome.

By W. WARDE FOWLER, author of Social Life at Rome, etc. "Ai
accurate, scholarly, and unusually entertaining history from the ear
liest authentic records to the death of Marcus Aurelius." — American
Library Association Booklist.

84. The Growth of Europe.

By GRANVILLE COLE, Professor of Geology, Royal College of Science
Ireland. A study of the geology and physical geography in rnnnrc
tion with the political geography.

13. Medieval Europe.

By H. W. C. DAVIS, Fellow at Balliol College, Oxford, author o
Charlemagne, etc.

33. The History of England.

By A. F. POLLARD, Professor of English History, Universisty o
London.

3. The French Revolution.

By HILAIRE BELLOC. "For the busy man it would be difficult t<
name another work better suited for the purpose of conveying ar
intelligent idea of the greatest political event of modern times."—
San rranacisco Chronicle.

A Short History of War and Peace.

By G. H. PERRIS, author of Russia in Rei'olution, etc. The Hon.
James Bryce writes: "I have read it with much interest and pleas-
ure, admiring the skill with which you have managed to compress so
many facts and views into so small a volume."

0. History of Our Time (1885-1911).

By G. P. GOOCH. A "moving picture" of the world since IMS.

2. The Papacy and Modern Times.

By REV. WILLIAM BARRY, D. D., author of The Papal Mo*^
etc. The story of the rise and fall of the Temporal Power.

5. Polar Exploration.

By DR. W. S. BRUCE, Leader of the "Scotia" expedition. Empha-
sizes the results of the expeditions, not in miles traveled, but in
valuable information brought home. "Of enormous interest. "-
Chatauqua Press.

L8. The Opening-up of Africa.

By Sir H. H. JOHNSTON. The first living authority on the •ubject
tells how and why the "native races" went to the variout part*
Africa and summarizes its exploration and colonisation. (With
maps.)

19. The Civilization of China.

By H. A. GILES, Professor of Chinese, Cambridge, author of A
tory of Chinese Literature, etc. A vivid outline of history, OWBMI

and customs, art, literature, and religion.

36. Peoples and Problems of India.

By SIR T. W. HOLDERNESS, Secretary of the Revenue, Statistfci, «
Commerce Department of the British India Office.
treatise dealing with the range of subjects lairly u
title."— The Dial.

7. Modern Geography.

Those to whom "geography •«§§•«
tr will rain a new view of the world
features to living

things and to some of the chief institutions of cmluatioi

51. Master Mariners.

By JOHN R. SPEARS, author of The History of <>*' N«n.
history of sea craft and sea adventure from the earliest time*.
an account of sea customs and the great seame

SOCIAL SCIENCE

and abroad.

79. Unemployment.

By A. C. PIGOU, M. A.,

Professor of Political Economy at Cam

bridge. The meaning, measurement, distribution, and effects of un
employment, its relation to wages, trade fluctuations, and disputes!
and some proposals of remedy or relief.

80. Common-Sense in Law.

By PROF. PAUL VINOGRADOFF, D. C. L., LL. D. Social and Legal
Rules — Legal Rights and Duties — Facts and Acts in Law — Legislation
— Custom — Judicial Precedents — Equity — The Law of Nature.

49. Elements of Political Economy.

By S. J. CHAPMAN, Professor of Political Economy and Dean oi
Faculty of Commerce and Administration, University of Manchesten
A clear statement of the theory of the subject for non-expert readers,

11. The Science of Wealth.

By J. A. HOBSON, author of Problems of Poverty. A study of thj
structure and working of the modern business world.

1. Parliament. Its History, Constitution, and
Practice.

By SIR COURTENAY P. ILBERT, Clerk of the House of Commond
"Can be praised without reserve. Admirably clear." — New York Sun

16. Liberalism.

By PROF. L. T. HOBHOUSE, author of Democracy and Reaction. A
masterly philosophical and historical review of the subject.

5. The Stock Exchange.

By F. W. HIRST, Editor of the London Economist. Reveals to thJ
non-financial mind the facts about investment, speculation, and ihi
other terms which the title suggests.

10. The Socialist Movement.

By J. RAMSAY MACDONALD, Chairman of the British Labor Party!
"The latest authoritative exposition of Socialism." — San Francis^c
Argonaut.

28. The Evolution of Industry.

By D. H. MACGREGOR, Professor of Political Economy, University
of Leeds. An outline of the recent changes that have given us th}
present conditions of the working classes and the principles involved

29. Elements of English Law.

By W. M. GELDART, Vinerian Professor of English Law, Oxford. A
simple statement of the basic principles of the English legal systerr
on which that of the United States is based.

32. The School : An Introduction to the Study of
Education.

By J. J. FINDLAY, Professor of Education, Manchester. Present!
the history, the psychological basis, and the theory of the school with
a rare power oi summary and suggestion.

6. Irish Nationality.

By MRS. J. R. GREEN. A brilliant account of the genius and missior
oi the Irish people. "An entrancing work, and I would advise everj
one with a drop of Irish blood in his veins or a vein of Irish sym
pathy in his heart to read it." — New York Times' Review.

NATURAL SCIENCE

58. Disease and Its -Causes.

By W. T. COUNCILMAN, M. D., LL. D.f Professor of Pathology. Har-

vard University.

85. Sex.

By J. ARTHUR THOMPSON and PATRICK GEDDES, joint author* of TW

Evolution of Sex.

71. Plant Life.

By T B. FARMER, D. Sc., F. R. S., Professor of Botany in

perial College of Science. This very fully illustrated Tolume eon

tains an account of the salient features of plant f

63. The Origin and Nature of Life.

By BENJAMIN M. MOORE, Professor of Bio-Chemistry, L

*RV RAPWAFL MELDOLA F R. S., Professor of Chemistry. Fi
?LhnkS College Presents the way in which the .cience ha,
oped and the stage it has reached.

53 V^SfS; Professor of EUctrica. &*«**

Birmingham.

8°"

Shows how the human body

hwSSb»M«inH«»'-'

9. The Evolution of Plants.

By DR. D. H. SCOTT, President of the Linnean Society of Londor
The story of the development of flowering plants, from the earlies
zoological times, unlocked from technical language.

43. Matter and Energy.

By F. SODDY, Lecturer in Physical Chemistry and Radioactivity
University of Glasgow. "Brilliant. Can hardly be surpassed. Sur.
to attract attention." — New York Sun.

41. Psychology, The Study of Behaviour.

By WILLIAM McDoucALL, of Oxford. A well digested summary o
the essentials of the science put in excellent literary form by a lead
ing authority.

42. The Principles of Physiology.

By PROF. J. G. MCKENDRICK. A compact statement by the Emeritu:
Professor at Glasgow, for uninstructed readers.

37. Anthropology.

By R. R. MARETT, Reader in Social Anthropology, Oxford. Seeks t<
plot out and su*m up the general series of changes, bodily and mental
undergone by man in the course of history. "Excellent. So enthusi
astic, so clear and witty, and so well adapted to the general reader.'
\ — American Library Association Booklist.

17. Crime and Insanity.

By DR. C. A. MERCIER, author of Text-Book of Insanity, etc.

12. The Animal World.

By PROF. F. W. GAMBLE.

15. Introduction to Mathematics.

By A. N. WHITEHEAD, author of Universal Algebra.

PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
69. A History of Freedom of Thought.

By JOHN B. BURY, M. A., LL. D., Regius Professor of Modern His
tory in Cambridge University. Summarizes the history of the loii|
struggle between authority and reason and of the emergence of th<
principle that coercion of opinion is a mistake.

55. Missions : The^r Rise and Development.

By MRS. MANDELL CREIGHTON, author of History of England. Th<
author seeks to prove that missions have done more to civilize thi
world than any other human agency.

52. Ethics.

By G. E. MOORE, Lecturer in Moral Science, Cambridge. Discusse
what is right and what is wrong, and the whys and wherefores.

65. The Literature of the Old Testament.

By GEORGE F. MOORE, Professor of the History of Religion, Harvar<
University. "A popular work of the highest order. Will be profit
able to anybody who cares enough about Bible study to read a seriou
book on the subject." — American Journal of Theology

50. The Making of the New Testament.

By B. W. BACON, Professor of New Testament Crtocism, Yale. Ai
authoritative summary of the results of modern critical research
with regard to the origins of the New Testament.

5. The Problems of Philosophy.

By BERTRAND RUSSELL, Lecturer and Late Fellow Trinitv

Cambridge.

4. Buddhism.

By MRS. RHYS DAVIDS, Lecturer on Indian Philosophy, Manchester.

6. English Sects: A History of Nonconfom

By W. B. SELBIE, Principal of Manchester College, Oxford.

10. Comparative Religion.

By PROF. J. ESTLIN CARPENTER. "One of the few authorities on tkis

subject compares all the religions to see what they have to u"
the great themes of religion." — Christian Work o»J

;8. Religious Development Between Old and New
Testaments.

By R. H. CHARLES, Canon of Westminster. Shows how religious
and ethical thought between 180 B. C. and 100 A. D. grew naturally

into that of the New Testament.

LITERATURE AND ART
r3. Euripides and His Age.

By GILBERT MURRAY, Regius Professor of Creek, Oxford. Bring*
before the reader an undisputedly great j.«i«-t ami JUBAT

ingly successful playwright, and a figure of high significance in the

history of humanity.

51. Chaucer and His Times.

By GRACE E. HADOW, Lecturer Lady Margaret Hall. Oxford: Late

Reader, Bryn Mawr.

0. Ancient Ar.t and Ritual.

By JANE E. HARRISON, LL. D., D. Litt. "One of the 100 moat i»

portant books of 1913."— New York Times Review.

51. The Victorian Age in Literature.

By G K. CHESTERTON. The most powerfully sustained and brilliant
piece of writing Mr. Chesterton has yet published.

). Dr. Johnson and His Circle.

By JOHN BAILEY. Johnson's life, character, works, and j
are surveyed; and there is a notable vindication of I
Boswell."

>8. The Newspaper.

By G. BINNEY DIBBLE. The first full account, from tt
newspaper organization as it exist!

52. Painters and Painting.

By SIR FREDERICK WEDMORE. With 16 half-t

34. The Literature of Germany.

By J. G.

t/ the 'French Renaissance.

40. The English Language.

By L. P. SMITH. A concise history of the origin and developmeu
of the English language.

45. Medieval English Literature.

By W. P. KER, Professor of English Literature, University Collegi
London. "One of the soundest scholars. His style is effective, sin
pie, yet never dry." — The Athenaeum.

89. Elizabethan Literature.

By J M. ROBERTSON, M. P., author of "Montaigne and Shaki
speare," "Modern Humanists."

27. Modern English Literature.

By G. H. MAIR. From Wyatt and Surrey to Synge and Yeats, "j
most suggestive book, one of the best of this great series." — Chicaa
Evening Post.

2. Shakespeare.

By JOHN MASEFIELD. "One of the very few indispensable adjunct
to a Shakespearean Library." — Boston Transcript.

31. Landmarks in French Literature.

By G. L. STRACHEY, Scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge. "For
survey of the outstanding figures of French literature with an acut
analysis of the contribution which each made to his time and to th
general mass there has been no book as yet published so judiciall;
interesting." — The Chantauquan.

38. Architecture.

By PROF. W. R. LETHABY. An introduction to the history am
theory of the art of building. "Professor Lethaby's scholarship am
extraordinary knowledge of the most recent discoveries of archaea
logical research provide the reader with a new outlook and with nev
facts." — The Athenaeum.

66. Writing English Prose.

By WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, Professor of English, Columbia Univer
sity. "Should be put into the hands of every man who is beginninj
to write and of every teacher of English that has brains enough ti
understand sense." — New York Sun.

83. William Morris : His Work and- Influence.

By A. GLUTTON BROCK, author of Shellev: The Man and the Fuel
William Morris believed that the artist should toil for love of hi
work rather than the gain of his employer, and so he turned fror
making works of art to remaking society.

OTHER VOLUMES IN PREPARATION.

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
34 West 33d Street New Yorl

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